From TheNextPlatform, October 5:
Some details are emerging on Europe’s first exascale system, codenamed “Jupiter” and to be installed at the Jülich Supercomputing Center in Germany in 2024. There has been a lot of speculation about what Jupiter will include for its compute engines and networking and who will build and maintain the system. We now know some of this and can infer some more from the statements that were made by the organizations participating in the Jupiter effort.
In June 2022, the Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, which has played host to many supercomputers since it was founded in 1987, was chosen to host the first of three European exascale-class supercomputers to be funded through the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and through the European national and state governments countries who are essentially paying to make sure these HPC and AI clusters are where they want them. With Germany having the largest economy in Europe and being a heavy user of HPC thanks to its manufacturing focus, Jülich was the obvious place to park the first machine in Europe to break the exaflops barrier.
That barrier is as much an economic one as it is a technical one. The six-year budget for Jupiter weighs in at €500 million, which is around $526.1 million at current exchange rates between the US dollar and the European euro. That is in the same ballpark price as what the “Frontier” exascale machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the “El Capitan” machine that is being installed right now at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – both of which are based on a combination of AMD CPUs and GPUs and Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Slingshot variant of Ethernet with HPE as the prime contractor.
Everybody knows that Jupiter was going to use SiPearl’s first generation Arm processor based on the Neoverse “Zeus” V1 core from Arm Ltd, which is codenamed “Rhea” by SiPearl and which is appropriate since Zeus and Jupiter are the same god of sky, thunder, and lightning – the Greek “Zeus Pater” with a Celtic accent becomes “Jupiter”. Rhea, of course, is the wife of Cronos and the mother of Zeus in the Greek and therefore Roman mythology. It is a pity that the French semiconductor startup could not do a design based on the Neoverse “Demeter” V2 core – the one that Nvidia is using in its “Grace” Arm server CPU. But frankly, the CPU host is not as important as the GPU accelerators when it comes to vector and matrix math oomph. To be sure, the vector performance of the CPU host is important for all-CPU applications that haven’t been ported to accelerators or can’t easily or economically be ported to GPUs or other kinds of accelerators, and there is every indication that the Rhea1 chips will be able to do these jobs better than existing supercomputers at Jülich. We shall see when more feeds and speeds of the system are announced at the upcoming SC23 supercomputing conference in Denver next month.
The word on the street is that the 1 exaflops figure that the EuroHPC project and that Jülich has talked about when referring to the Jupiter system is a metric gauging the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark performance on this system, and that allows us to do some rough math on how many accelerators might be in the Jupiter machine and what the peak theoretical performance of the Jupiter machine might be....
