Europe's first exascale computer, JUPITER, will be installed at the Jülich Supercomputing Center in Germany.
The gargantuan project is expected to cost more than €500 million in infrastructure, material and installation costs alone, and should be operational by 2024.
An exascale-class machine is a significant achievement even by supercomputer standards, representing computing power greater than five million modern laptops or PCs, and equal to the neural processing power of the human brain according to the Human Brain Project. .
How will it be used?
The power of the machine will be used for climate modelling, materials engineering, biological simulations and research on sustainable energy production.
Half of the funding for JUPITER, which stands for "Large-Scale Transformative and Innovative Research Pioneering Joint Venture", will be provided by EuroHPC JU, while the other half of the costs will be borne by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. ( BMBF) and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the Land of North Rhine-Westphalia (MKW NRW).
EuroHPC JU also announced the construction of several other high-performance computers across Europe: Levente, hosted in Hungary, Caspir, hosted in Ireland, EHPCPL, hosted in Poland, and Daedalus, hosted in Greece.
JUPITER's exact hardware specs have yet to be shared, but EuroHPC says the machine has strong renewable energy credentials and will only need 15 MW of power, which will come from renewable projects.
EuroHPC also says that the machine will use hot water cooling and could be connected to a district heating system.
Currently, the only exascale computer in the Western world is Frontier, an AMD-powered machine housed at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) in Tennessee, USA.
It has been widely reported that China currently operates two exascale machines, although little is known about them.
JUPITER is not the only extremely powerful European supercomputer in the news.
EuroHPC JU) has deployed Europe's most powerful supercomputer, LUMI, in the Finnish city of Kajaani, which is built entirely on AMD hardware.