JUPITER Supercomputer Officially Inaugurated in Jülich
At the inauguration ceremony in Jülich, attended by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) and NVIDIA officially launched JUPITER — Europe’s first exascale supercomputer.
Built on Eviden’s BullSequana XH3000 liquid-cooled architecture and powered by the NVIDIA Grace Hopper platform, JUPITER is capable of executing 1 quintillion FP64 operations per second and is expected to deliver up to 90 exaflops of AI performance. This makes it more than twice as fast as the next most powerful system in Europe, positioning it as a cornerstone of Europe’s computing and AI leadership.
“JUPITER marks the culmination of more than a decade of research and development,” said Thomas Lippert, director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. “It opens up entirely new possibilities for science and industry in Europe.”
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang added:
“With JUPITER, Europe gains its most advanced AI supercomputer, built for large-scale simulation and AI. It fuses high-performance computing and AI into a single architecture, enabling breakthroughs across climate science, quantum research, material design, digital twins and more.”
Unlocking Innovation Across Disciplines
JUPITER — short for “Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research” — will empower European startups, researchers and enterprises to push the boundaries of science and technology. Early projects already highlight its transformative potential in:
- Climate science – The Max Planck Institute for Meteorology is running ultra-high-resolution models (1 km scale) to simulate extreme weather events such as violent thunderstorms and heavy rainfall.
- Generative AI & LLMs – A German-led consortium is developing TrustLLM, training multilingual language models tailored to European languages for use across industries.
- Neuroscience – Researcher Thorsten Hater is using JUPITER to simulate neuron behavior at the subcellular level, advancing the fight against neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.
- Quantum simulation – JUPITER is set to surpass the current supercomputing record of handling 48 qubits, potentially reaching beyond 50 — a milestone toward practical quantum computing.
Driving Europe’s AI and Research Leadership
Flagship projects across the continent are already harnessing JUPITER’s massive power:
- Molecular dynamics – The Max Planck Institute of Biophysics will model the nuclear pore complex at atomic detail, helping fight retroviruses such as HIV.
- Multilingual LLMs – The University of Edinburgh is generating synthetic training data for LLMs capable of reasoning over long documents across multiple languages.
- Particle physics – The University of Wuppertal will scale its microphysical computations to study the muon’s magnetic moment, opening doors to new particle discoveries.
- Foundation models for video – Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich is developing next-gen video models for applications from medical imaging to autonomous driving.
- Multimodal AI – The University of Lisbon is creating multilingual, multimodal foundation models to support all European languages, overcoming limitations of today’s systems.
A New Era for European Science and Industry
With unmatched speed, energy efficiency, and versatility, JUPITER is more than a supercomputer — it’s a platform for Europe’s scientific and industrial future. From climate resilience to AI-driven innovation, it is set to accelerate discoveries that will shape the decades ahead.
