This is the big leagues in computing and they are tackling the big questions: complex-chaotic systems and our old nemesis, turbulence.
From IEEE Spectrum, June 26:
Debuting at No. 4 on the TOP500, JUPITER could open vast scientific vistas
If you want to visualize the surface air flowing across every meter of the planet Earth, you need to plot nearly three trillion squares of land and sea and space. To do that you need a mind-bogglingly big calculator.
Which is why Ioan Hadade, a computational scientist working with vast weather forecasting and climate models, is excited about the machine now online an hour down the road from his lab in Bonn, Germany. Europe’s first exascale supercomputer—called JUPITER, after a much bigger planet than our own—is nearly fully operational. It is currently running scientific programs on its formidable processors.
JUPITER debuted at No. 4 in the June 2025 global TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful computer systems.
It is based at the Jülich Supercomputing Center in the German Rhineland between Cologne and Aachen, running on a booster module with 5,900 accelerating compute nodes. Some 24,000-odd Nvidia Grace-Hopper superchips give JUPITER its oomph; the machine also features a universal cluster module with 1,300 nodes using Rhea1 processors, and an InfiniBand NDR network for the high-speed interconnects.
The semi-annual TOP500 rankings are a way to engage every single element of a machine for performance. Benchmarking proves the functionality of a highly complex operation. “And now, it’s better to have some science done on the machine,” says Thomas Lippert, director of the Jülich Supercomputing Center.
Computational Science at Scale
As of mid-June research enterprises were on the JUPITER machine testing scientific calculations. “You need a really large machine to run this,” Hadade says. He’s referring to the Destination Earth digital twin projects he and his colleagues are part of developing at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts....
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Here's the press release from Top500:
El Capitan Retains Top Spot in 65th TOP500 List as Exascale Era Expands
The 65th edition of the TOP500 showed that the El Capitan system retains the No. 1 position. With El Capitan, Frontier, and Aurora, there are now 3 Exascale systems leading the TOP500. All three are installed at Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories in the United States.
The El Capitan system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, remains the No. 1 system on the TOP500. The HPE Cray EX255a system was measured with 1.742 EFlop/s on the HPL benchmark. LLNL now also submitted a measurement for the HPCG benchmark, achieving 17.41 Petaflop/s, which makes the system the new No. 1 on this ranking as well.
El Capitan has 11,039,616 cores and is based on AMD 4th generation EPYC processors with 24 cores at 1.8 GHz and AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators. It uses the HPE Slingshot interconnect for data transfer and achieves an energy efficiency of 60.3 Gigaflops/watt. El Capitan is the 3rd system exceeding the Exaflop mark on the HPL benchmark.
The Frontier system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, is the No. 2 system on the TOP500. Frontier has been remeasured with an HPL score of 1.353 EFlop/s.
Frontier is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and is equipped with AMD 3rd generation EPYC 64C 2GHz processors. The system has 8,699,904 total cores and also relies on HPE Slingshot interconnect for data transfer.
The Aurora system at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, Illinois, was submitted with 1.012 EFlop/s on the HPL benchmark, which keeps it in the No. 3 spot on the TOP500.
Aurora is built by Intel based on the HPE Cray EX - Intel Exascale Compute Blade, which uses Intel Xeon CPU Max Series processors and Intel Data Center GPU Max Series accelerators, which communicate through HPE Slingshot interconnect.
The JUPITER Booster system at the EuroHPC / Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany at No. 4 is the only new system in the TOP 10.
JUPITER - JU Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research – was announced as the first EuroHPC exascale supercomputer (see https://jupiter.fz-juelich.de). It is currently being commissioned and has achieved a preliminary HPL value of 793.4 Petaflop/s on a partial system. The system is located at the Forschungszentrum Jülich campus in Germany and is operated by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. It is based on the Eviden’s BullSequana XH3000 direct liquid-cooled architecture.
Here is a summary of the system in the Top 10....
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