NEWS

In April, 2024, staff members at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) installed the first module of their upcoming exascale supercomputer, JUPITER. The Jülich Exscale Development Instrument (JEDI) will not only help prepare researchers for using the full power of JUPITER when it comes online, but also will help JSC staff members continue to refine their approach to one of the biggest topics in next-generation computing: ensuring these world-class resources are as energy efficient as possible.

While there is more to do for improving energy efficiency in high-performance computing, JSC is off to a good start with their latest system. During the kick-off of the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC24) in Hamburg, Germany, the Top500 organization released its recent rankings of the most powerful and efficient supercomputers in the world. In the organization’s Green500 rankings, which rank the world’s most energy efficient systems, JEDI took first place, calculating 72 billion floating-point operations per second per watt. JEDI blew past the previous record of 65 billion floating-point operations per second per watt. The system is among the first in the world to make use of NVIDIA’s GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, which combines the company’s Hopper GPU with its Grace CPU onto a single module.

In addition to selecting the most energy efficient architecture possible during the procurement, JSC staff are focused on saving water and electricity in running the system, as well as reusing waste heat generated by the system. “With JUPITER, energy consumption—in this case green energy—and a possible heat-reuse were important topics from scratch,” said Benedikt von St. Vieth, Head of JSC’s HPC, Cloud, Data Systems and Services Division. “The hardware offers various facilities for energy optimization. With JEDI, we are now able to prepare well in advance, and see which parts of these can be utilized by our end-users to optimize their workloads.”

The final JUPITER system as well as JEDI’s funding is provided half by the European Union via EuroHPC, and the other two quarters by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (MKW-NRW) through the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS). Jupiter will be Europe’s first exascale system when full installation is completed later this year.

For more information about JEDI, read the full press release on the Forschungszentrum Jülich website.

For the full Green500 list, click here.

-Eric Gedenk