Jupiter (supercomputer)
Jupiter is an exascale supercomputer hosted at Forschungszentrum Jülich in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Developed by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre and owned by the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, Jupiter became operational in June 2025. It is based on a modular architecture featuring NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips and is recognized as Europe's fastest supercomputer, ranking 4th on the November 2025 TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. Jupiter is also the most energy-efficient system among the top five.
Design
Jupiter uses a modular architecture with around 24,000 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, optimized for highly parallel applications such as training AI models or numerically demanding simulations. This enables the training of the largest AI models, known as large language models. At full capacity, Jupiter can complete such tasks in less than one week.The supercomputer is designed with advanced cooling techniques, including warm water cooling, to manage heat dissipation and improve energy efficiency. The waste heat generated is used to heat buildings and is integrated into the Jülich campus heating network.
Jupiter's storage system includes high-capacity, high-speed solutions to handle vast amounts of data, providing rapid data access and retrieval to support intensive computational tasks. The network infrastructure employs high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnects to ensure high-speed data transfer and communication between nodes.
History
Jupiter was developed as part of a broader initiative to enhance Europe's computational infrastructure, crucial for maintaining competitiveness in scientific research, technological innovation, and industrial applications. The project involves collaboration among several European countries, research institutions, and technology companies.In the future, the Booster partition of Jupiter will be supported by a Cluster partition, supplied by ParTec, featuring conventional central processing units with high memory bandwidth. The Cluster is specially designed for data-intensive tasks.
Jupiter was presented at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg in June 2025, where it was recognized as the most energy-efficient system among the top five supercomputers globally.
In September 2025, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, his Minister of Research, Technology and Space Dorothee Bär and European Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation Ekaterina Zaharieva inaugurated Jupiter during a visit to Forschungszentrum Jülich.
Funding
Jupiter is funded by the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space, and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia via the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing. The total budget for the acquisition, delivery, installation, and maintenance of Jupiter is €500 million, with €273 million allocated for hardware, software, and services, and the remaining €227 million for power, cooling, and operations.Early access and research
Jupiter and its storage systems have been fully installed, with scientific users gaining access in the coming weeks. Over 100 national and international applications have been selected via the Jupiter Research and Early Access Program, the GCS Exascale Pioneer Call, and the Gauss AI Compute Competition for AI projects.Applications
Jupiter supports a variety of applications, including but not limited to:- Climate modeling and weather forecasting: Enhancing climate and weather simulations to significantly improve predictions of local extreme weather events, such as heavy rain and severe thunderstorms.
- Molecular dynamics and materials science
- Astrophysics and cosmology
- Industrial simulations and engineering
- Training of large language models and other AI models
Collaborations and partnerships
- Forschungszentrum Jülich
- European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking
- Various academic and industrial research organizations
Impact