European Exascale Supercomputer JUPITER Sets New Energy Efficiency Standards with #1 Ranking in GREEN500

Press Release

European Exascale Supercomputer JUPITER Sets New Energy Efficiency Standards with #1 Ranking in GREEN500

Paris, France and Hamburg, Germany – May 13, 2024 – The first module of the exascale supercomputer JUPITER, named JEDI, is ranked first place in the Green500 list of the most energy-efficient supercomputers worldwide, as announced today by Forschungszentrum Jülich and EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, together with the ParTec-Eviden supercomputer consortium at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Hamburg. The JUPITER Exascale Development Instrument was installed in April by the German–French consortium and has the same hardware as the JUPITER booster module, which is currently being built at Forschungszentrum Jülich.

The rapid pace of digitalisation and the increasing use of artificial intelligence requires an increasing amount of computing power and, in turn, energy. Data centres now account for 4 % of German electricity consumption, and this trend is increasing. As a result, efficient computing has become an increasingly important issue in recent years. Research as well as measures to increase energy efficiency have also been on the rise.

The JUPITER supercomputer procured by the European supercomputing initiative EuroHPC Joint Undertaking is a true pioneer in this field. The first module installed in April, the JUPITER Exascale Development Instrument (JEDI), is capable of 72 billion floating-point operations per second per watt. In contrast, the previous leader achieved around 65 billion.

The decisive factor for the module’s outstanding efficiency is its use of graphics processing units (GPUs) and the fact that it is possible to optimise scientific applications for calculations on GPUs. Today, virtually all leading systems on the Green500 ranking rely heavily on GPUs, which are designed to perform calculations with much greater energy efficiency than conventional central processing units (CPUs).

The JEDI development system is one of the first systems in the world to use the latest generation of accelerators from NVIDIA: the NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip, which combines the NVIDIA Hopper GPU and the NVIDIA Grace CPU on a single module. Based on Eviden’s latest BullSequana XH3000 architecture, the system includes its highly efficient hot water cooling system, Direct Liquid Cooling, which requires significantly less energy than conventional air cooling, and allows the heat generated to be reused downstream.