Europe's JUPITER exascale supercomputer comes online

The European Commission and Germany inaugurated the JUPITER exascale supercomputer at Forschungszentrum Jülich on 5 September.

• Main announcement/action: JUPITER is an exascale supercomputer officially reaching the exascale threshold (surpassing one quintillion / 10^18 operations per second) and is listed as the fourth-fastest machine in the world with a benchmark of about 800 petaflops and peak capability exceeding 1 exaflop; it runs on ~24,000 NVIDIA chips, draws 17 megawatts at full load (equivalent to powering ~11,000 homes), and the EU says it “runs entirely on renewable energy”. JUPITER is funded by the European Commission and Germany and is located at Forschungszentrum Jülich; it booted and performed first computations in July 2025 and was inaugurated on 5 September 2025.
• Background and implementation details: Development began since 2018; Jülich project lead Thomas Lippert says the system will help train talent to build and operate such machines. Researchers can apply to use JUPITER up to twice a year, 30 projects have already been selected spanning AI (foundation models, video generation), climate models, particle physics, energy applications, and biomedical research. The project ranks first in energy efficiency on the Green500 list and achieves renewable operation by purchasing renewable energy from Germany’s national grid.