The global supercomputer TOP500 list for the first half of this year has been announced a few days ago, and the US supercomputer “Frontier”, which entered the list for the first time, ranked first. This is the world’s first computing power of 10 billion per second. The supercomputing of sub-floating-point operations has opened up the era of post-exascale supercomputers.
It is reported that the first post-exascale computer will be the European Union’s Jupiter supercomputer, which represents a joint commitment to innovation and transformative exascale research. Europe hopes to enter the same track as China and the United States.
The European High-Performance Computing Joint Project (EuroHPC JU) has announced that Germany will bring the first public European exascale supercomputer mainframe, as well as four other smaller but still powerful supercomputing systems.
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Jupiter will be a “joint venture pioneer of innovative and transformative exascale research.” The system will start up next year in a specially designed building at the Forschungszentrum Jülich Research Center, operated by the Jülich Supercomputing Center (JSC), alongside the existing Juwels and Jurica supercomputers.
The four mid-range systems are Daedalus hosted by the National Research and Technology Infrastructure in Greece; Levente by the Hungarian Government Information Technology Development Agency; Kaspiel by the National University of Galway in Ireland; and EHPCPL by the Polish Academic Computing Centre.
According to EuroHPC, Jupiter will be used to help scientists solve important scientific problems such as climate change, how to fight epidemics, and sustainable energy production, and aims to realize the application of artificial intelligence and big data volume analysis.
Reaching the exascale level is the next big step forward in high-performance computing, says Prof. Dr. Astrid Lambrecht of the Forschungszentrum Jülich Board of Directors.
She said: “Our aim is to provide the most robust infrastructure in Europe, combining neuromorphic computing, supercomputing, and quantum computing, to ensure that diverse user groups from science and industry can learn and grow together, while also benefiting from each other. ”
According to reports, half of Jupiter’s 500 million euros (about 520 million US dollars, or 430 million pounds) of funding will come from the EuroHPC JU project, and the other half will be funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and North Rhine-Westphalia. Provided by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State (MKW NRW), where the Forschungszentrum Jülich is located.
JUPITER will be based on a dynamic, modular supercomputing architecture that is already used in the “Juwels” supercomputer. This also allows the latter to be upgraded in 2020, with a CPU-based cluster module combined with a GPU-equipped acceleration module (based on Atos BullSequana X hardware).
For Jupiter, the currently known basic configuration will include a general-purpose cluster module and similar GPU-accelerated modules, as well as a large-capacity parallel storage module, high-bandwidth flash memory, and high-capacity backup and storage setups.
In addition, Jupiter’s optional units include another GPU acceleration module and an interactive computing and visualization module, and in the future may also include a quantum processing unit and a neuromorphic processing module.
The similarity with LUMI is that this series of supercomputers may again use AMD’s chips, after all, energy efficiency is obvious to all. Five of the ten fastest supercomputers in the world today use AMD hardware, and the rest are also Arm and Nvidia, which is impressive.
According to Forschungszentrum Jülich, Jupiter is also apparently designed as a “green” supercomputer and will be powered by green energy, and it is expected that Jupiter’s cooling system will be connected to the campus’ new low-temperature network so that the waste heat generated can be reused.
In addition to the power of the exaFLOP, Jupiter is also expected to be the most efficient supercomputer in the world, with an average power consumption of just 15 megawatts. By comparison, Frontier, with its exascale performance, consumes about 21 megawatts. In this way, its power consumption is 22% lower than that of the current strongest American Frontier, and nearly 50% lower than that of Japan’s Fugaku (Arm chip).
In the supercomputing list in the first half of this year, a total of 173 supercomputers in China were on the list, ranking first in total. From the perspective of manufacturers, China’s Lenovo is currently the world’s largest supercomputer manufacturer.
After topping the list for two consecutive years, the Japanese supercomputer “Fuyue” was overtaken by “Frontier” and dropped to second place. The Finnish supercomputer “Lumi” ranks third, which is the largest supercomputer in Europe. The US supercomputing “apex”, which ranked second in the last list, dropped to fourth place this time.
The supercomputing “ridge” developed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ranked fifth. Two of the top ten supercomputers on the list are from China, namely “Shenwei Taihu Light” ranked sixth and “Tianhe No. 2” ranked ninth.
