One of the world's most powerful supercomputers will soon be online in Europe, but it's not just the raw speed that will make the Jupiter supercomputer special. Unlike most of the Top 500 list, the exascale Jupiter system will rely on ARM cores instead of x86 parts. Intel and AMD might be disappointed, but Nvidia will get a piece of the Jupiter action.
Exascale supercomputers are machines capable of running calculations at one exaflop or higher. A FLOP (floating point operations per second) is the commonly agreed upon method for ranking supercomputer speeds. On the most recent revision of the Top 500 list, all of the world's most powerful supercomputers run at one or more petaflops. An exaflop is 1,000 petaflops (or 10^18 flops), but only a few systems have ever managed that kind of speed.
Jupiter is a project of the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), which is working with computing firms Eviden and ParTec to assemble the machine. Europe's first exascale computer will be installed at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Munich, and assembly could start as soon as early 2024.
EuroHPC has opted to go with SiPearl’s Rhea processor, which is based on ARM architecture. Most of the top 10 supercomputers in the world are running x86 chips, and only one is running on ARM. While ARM designs were initially popular in mobile devices, the compact, efficient cores have found use in more powerful systems. Apple has recently finished moving all its desktop and laptop computers to the ARM platform, and Qualcomm has new desktop-class chips on its roadmap.
Rhea is based on ARM's Neoverse V1 CPU design, which was developed specifically for high-performance computing (HPC) applications with 72 cores. It supports HBM2e high-bandwidth memory, as well as DDR5, and the cache tops out at an impressive 160MB. Intel recently stepped up its efforts in Europe with a major manufacturing operation launching in Germany. Despite CEO Pat Gelsinger discussions with European Union officials to secure more business for Intel, the chipmaker has been shut out of the project.
Nvidia is the other big winner in the Jupiter project. The system will have Nvidia’s Booster Module, which includes GPUs and Mellanox ultra-high bandwidth interconnects. The group has not announced which Nvidia chips will be in Jupiter, but the current-gen H100 seems like a safe bet. It overshadows the older A100, and Nvidia has yet to announce a successor to the H100, which debuted in 2022.
When complete, Jupiter will be near the very top of the supercomputer list. The current leader is Frontier, a system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US. This AMD-based system is capable of 1.1 exaflops.
