The first exascale computer in Europe, called JUPITER, should be completed next year, and it may even become the most powerful computer in the world. It will allow experiments and simulations currently only possible on a tiny number of machines in the US and China.
Exascale machines can carry out a billion billion operations per second, an exaflop. Currently, there are 鈥� officially 鈥� only two supercomputers in the world capable of those sorts of calculations: the Frontier machine at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory聽in Tennessee and Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.
But it is widely believed that there are at least two secretive exascale machines in China that haven鈥檛 been submitted to benchmark testing to go on the industry鈥檚 .
Advertisement
JUPITER, short for聽, will be built at the J眉lich Supercomputing Centre in Germany by the 聽a partnership between the European Union and private businesses.
at SiPearl, the company that will supply custom ARM-based chip designs for JUPITER, says that when the machine is completed, it may be powerful enough to take the top spot on the TOP500 supercomputer list, as long as nobody else builds a faster one in the meantime.
It is likely that the machine will also use thousands of high-end graphics cards from Nvidia, which are currently in high demand and short supply.
Notton says JUPITER鈥檚 final position in the list will be down to the academics running the machine and the benchmark score that they can eke out of the hardware. 鈥淭hey will do their best to be number one,鈥� he says.
Although outright performance is important, he says, minimising energy consumption is crucial. The overall cost of building and running JUPITER for three years has been given as 鈧�500 million, which includes the estimated annual 鈧�100 million cost of electricity. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not only a question of having the largest machine; you need to manage the bill,鈥� says Notton.
The fastest supercomputers in Europe are currently the globally fifth-ranked LUMI in Finland, which delivers a peak performance of 309 petaflops 鈥� about a third of an exaflop 鈥� and the sixth-ranked Leonardo in Italy, which peaks at 239 petaflops. The UK鈥檚 most powerful machine is ARCHER2, a 拢79 million machine funded by the UK government, which sits at number 39 in the Top500 list.
The UK government鈥檚 Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has announced that it will fund an exascale machine at the University of Edinburgh, but .
A second EU-funded exascale supercomputer is also , but no details of its architecture or development timeline have yet been released.
at the University of Bristol, UK, says it will probably take much of 2024 to build JUPITER, but when it is finished, it will provide abilities far beyond Europe鈥檚 current best.
鈥淓ven with LUMI, there are science challenges that are too big,鈥� he says. 鈥淭he classic one is very high-resolution, whole-globe, weather and climate simulations. If you want to do those on a kilometre-grid scale, that鈥檚 roughly an exascale problem. Even LUMI would struggle to do something like that, but that鈥檚 the sort of thing that JUPITER will enable.鈥�
The UK was set to be excluded from access to JUPITER following Brexit, but a 聽means it could be able to participate to some extent.
