Germany Reclaims Title of Europe's Fastest Supercomputer

Germany once again boasts the title of hosting Europe's fastest supercomputer, the Jupiter Booster, located at the Forschungszentrum Jülich. Currently positioned fourth on the prestigious Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers, it surpasses all others in Europe.

Replacing the Italian HPC6, the Jupiter Booster outstrips the US-based Eagle system, which utilizes Nvidia technology. However, the latest upgrades to the Jupiter Booster have not yet achieved full operational capacity, causing it to fall short of the exaflops milestone. Full operational capabilities are expected to be realized by July 2025.

The current iteration of the Jupiter Booster already achieves 793.4 petaflops, nearly 18 times faster than its predecessor, the Juwels, which recorded 44.12 petaflops. This measurement is based on the High-Performance Linpack benchmark using double-precision floating-point arithmetic (FP64), primarily focusing on matrix multiplications. It is important to note that the Top500 list may not represent all supercomputers, as many hyperscale companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta do not submit their computing results.

The Jupiter Booster's architecture is modular, consisting of containerized components, and is supported by a traditional supercomputing segment known as the Jupiter Cluster. Notably, the smaller installation of the Jupiter Exascale Transition Instrument (JETI) had already outperformed its predecessor, Juwels, by a factor of two in November 2024 and ranked 18th on the Top500 list, while also securing sixth place on the Green500 list for energy efficiency.

Advanced Hardware Configuration

The system is engineered by Eviden and Atos, utilizing the BullSequana XH3000 series and integrating Nvidia's Grace Hopper Superchips GH200. Each chip combines a 72-core ARM processor with an H100 GPU, utilizing 96 GB of HBM3 RAM. Overall, the Jupiter Booster is expected to occupy 125 racks and will feature approximately 24,000 GH200 chips across 6,000 nodes, amounting to a staggering total of 2.3 petabytes of ultra-fast HBM3 memory. The cooling system employs warm water, and around 4,800 nodes are currently operational.

In terms of AI model training, the Jupiter Booster will deliver even higher speeds as it utilizes simpler data formats like FP8. The FZ Jülich anticipates achieving over 70 AI exaflops once the supercomputer reaches its full capacity, with Nvidia projecting that this could exceed 90 AI exaflops. The exceptional AI performance is attributed not only to the lower FP8 precision but also to the computation of sparse matrices, which significantly enhances throughput.

The system is also set to include 21 petabytes of high-speed mass storage, featuring 40 IBM Elastic Storage Server 3500 units equipped with NVMe SSDs, capable of achieving data transfer rates of up to 4 terabytes per second for reading and 3 terabytes per second for writing.

*RMax indicates the floating-point computing power measured by Linpack (FP64).