PRESS RELEASES

BERLIN, Germany and KAJANNI, Finland June 15, 2022—Leadership of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking today announced that the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) would be named as hosting entity for Europe’s first exascale supercomputer.

JSC at Forschungszentrum Jülich is one of the three high-performance computing (HPC) centres in the German national Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS). The €500 million for the machine will be financed by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), the Ministry of Culture and Science of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.

The exascale machine will be named JUPITER, an acronym for “Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research.”

“We are honoured that, together with our partners in academia and industry, we have been selected to take the first step toward exascale in Europe,” said Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Lippert, Director of JSC and current Chairman of the Board of Directors at GCS. “We are prepared to tackle the significant technical challenges of exascale computing because we are deeply convinced that society at large will profit from JUPITER. Whether it is traffic optimization, autonomous driving, or global environmental monitoring by using digital twins, many of society’s greatest challenges are compute-intensive problems that can be aided by leveraging an exascale computing system.”

“This selection process confirms to us that such massive investments in Europe’s long-term scientific excellence and competitiveness are only possible through the close cooperation of national and European policy makers,” said Dr. Claus-Axel Müller, Managing Director of GCS. 

Exascale computing represents a long-awaited landmark in the growth of HPC technologies. Capable of at least 1 quintillion calculations per second (this is 1 trillion in the European numbering system), exascale computers promise to usher in a new era of supercomputing and enable new research breakthroughs by leveraging the advances in computational power to help solve a host of data-intensive problems and other scientific challenges that have proven too computationally complex for even the world’s most powerful supercomputers to date.

The news also falls in line with the GCS Smart Scaling Strategy, which in partnership with the BMBF and the respective ministries of the German states of Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, and North Rhine-Westphalia, aims to install exascale machines at all three of the GCS centres—the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart and the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre as well as JSC—within two and four years, with planned funding including operations until the end of 2032.

For more information, please visit the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking or Forschungszentrum Jülich websites. 

-Eric Gedenk, e.gedenk@gauss-centre.eu

About GCS:  The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) combines the three national supercom-puting centres HLRS (High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart), JSC (Jülich Supercomputing Centre), and LRZ (Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Garching near Munich) into Germany’s Tier-0 supercomputing institution. Together the three centres provide the largest and most powerful supercomputing infrastructure in all of Europe and serve a wide range of industrial and research activities across various disciplines. They also provide top-tier training and education for the national as well as the European High Performance Computing (HPC) community. GCS is the German member of PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), an international non-profit association consisting of 25 member countries, whose representative organizations create a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure, providing access to computing and data management resources and services for large-scale scientific and engineering applications at the highest performance level.

GCS is jointly funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the federal states of Baden-Württemberg (State Ministry for Science, Education, and the Arts), Bavaria (State Ministry for Science and the Arts) and North Rhine-Westphalia (Ministry of Culture and Science). It has its headquarters in Berlin/Germany. (www.gauss-centre.eu)