Europe has officially entered the elite global supercomputing race with the inauguration of JUPITER, its first exascale supercomputer.
Europe has officially entered the elite global supercomputing race with the inauguration of JUPITER, its first exascale supercomputer. Housed at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, JUPITER (Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research) is a collaborative investment by the European Union and Germany which hasn’t come cheap—think $587 million (€500 million). This freshly-minted tool is hoped to close the technology gap with the United States and China, particularly in the fields of AI, climate science, and fundamental research.Now, an exascale-class machine is capable of performing at least one quintillion (a billion billion, or 1018) calculations per second. To put that in perspective, if every person on Earth were to perform one calculation per second, it would take more than four years to match what JUPITER can do in a single second.
