"With JUPITER, Europe becomes the home of the most powerful computer in Europe"
-- Henna Virkkunen
What does that mean?
jerf · 3h ago
My guess is that it means that not only does "Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy" write her quotes with AI without reading them carefully, but that she's also doing it with an older model.
wvbdmp · 3h ago
I think it’s pretty clear if you read the rest of the sentence, which you’ve omitted: “and the fourth most powerful in the world”. If she hadn’t said “in Europe”, the whole top 3 might be in Europe as well.
bprew · 3h ago
I took it to mean that the controller of the most powerful computer in Europe is Europe, as opposed to Apple or Google or another private entity.
vjvjvjvjghv · 3h ago
I am assuming before JUPITER the most powerful computer in Europe was not at home in Europe?
npalli · 2h ago
Confusing grammar aside, the most powerful computer before this was HPC6 in Italy which is definitely in Europe.
Your Top 500 link says something completely different:
"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."
HPC6 is listed below those, and far less powerful.
shreddit · 3h ago
To quote zefrank: The tallest giraffe is taller than all other giraffes
pona-a · 3h ago
Maybe they wanted to say “with [JUPITER, Europe],” as in “CERN, Switzerland.” This would still be unnecessary and confusing, but that’s the most sense I can make of it.
johnfn · 2h ago
I mean, it's a straightforward enough statement. But what was happening in Europe before..?
looks like its just a big Nvidia installation. IB, Ceph, K8s, H100s
ofrzeta · 3h ago
> a 21 Petabyte Flash Module (ExaFLASH) is provided based on the IBM Storage Scale
Nice. How much does this cost?
> The scratch storage is based on 20 IBM Storage Scale 6000 systems utilizing NVMe disk technology, based on the IBM Storage Scale solution. With 29 PB of raw and 21 PB of useable capacity
That's also a lot of waste, isn't it?
conception · 3h ago
With 29 PB of raw and 21 PB of useable capacity.
RAID gonna RAID.
poisonborz · 3h ago
Don't know why your're downvoted, this is valid criticism. EU just bought 500 mil worth of hardware from the US, no specific European innovation, apart from system management (ParTec Italy). But would be happy to be proven otherwise.
StrangeDoctor · 1h ago
Seems like it has 5 petaflops of compute from a SiPearl (French) designed Rhea-1
Which was delayed 2 years. I’m speculating this was supposed to be mostly or exclusively this but they needed a computer now. Or needed to spend the budget now.
frodo8sam · 3h ago
Who exactly were you going to buy equipment from? AMD/Nvidia/Intel are the only players in town.
themgt · 2h ago
China with SMIC and Huawei's Ascend 910C would be an example of what you do if you want to pursue strategic autonomy. It's like asking "who exactly were you going to buy a 6th generation fighter from?"
timlatim · 28m ago
Without questioning this idea on political grounds, I am not sure if it would be at all possible for an Ascend 910C cluster to enter the supercomputer rankings. I could not find a public datasheet on this chip (would appreciate a link), but my impression is that it is an AI accelerator that does not target FP64, whereas TOP500 is looking at HPC (FP64) performance [1].
It was probably more like system designed in Europe, made in China, assembled in Europe thing.
Sure, the HQ of the core component(Nvidia) is incorporated in US but that too is a multinational effort.
croes · 1h ago
So US supercomputers aren’t an achievement because they just bought chips from Taiwan and those aren’t also an achievement because they bought photolithography machines from ASML in Europe?
Since when are supercomputers anything other than just the ability to afford a lot of hardware?
mytailorisrich · 2h ago
Germany got European taxpayers to buy them US hardware. That's a fairly normal day in the EU.
notrealyme123 · 36m ago
Don't forget it's made in china.
OKRainbowKid · 1h ago
US Hardware, with essential components manufactured in Taiwan with European technology.
bayindirh · 3h ago
If that’s “so simple”, why we don’t see everyone “just” doing the same?
dotnet00 · 3h ago
To be fair, being "just" a big Nvidia installation doesn't really mean that it's "so simple" (person you're replying to didn't claim it was simple), considering that every "Nvidia installation" has a slightly different set of factors like node count, per node memory, CPU choice, and networking configuration. All it says is, like many (most?) other modern supercomputers, it's a giant NVIDIA GPU cluster.
BrouteMinou · 3h ago
It might just be expensive... Some other countries might just not need those when they are struggling to get fresh water...
And so on, but that's just my 2 cents.
wqweto · 3h ago
Europe is not a country.
liotier · 3h ago
Federal Europe is a proto-country - and we are already citizens of the European Union. In short: Europe is my country !
What does that mean?
https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2025/06/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputing_in_Europe
"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."
HPC6 is listed below those, and far less powerful.
"It is currently being commissioned and has achieved a preliminary HPL value of 793.4 Petaflop/s on a partial system."
Top 500 Rank: 4 (behind El Capitan, Frontier, and Aurora at the DOE)
System Config: JUPITER Booster - BullSequana XH3000, GH Superchip 72C 3GHz, NVIDIA GH200 Superchip, Quad-Rail NVIDIA InfiniBand NDR200, RedHat Enterprise Linux
Manufacturer: EVIDEN https://eviden.com/solutions/high-performance-computing/hpc-...
Location: EuroHPC/FZJ, Germany https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/ias/jsc/jupiter
Cores: 4,801,344
Rmax (PFlop/s) / Rpeak (PFlop/s): 793.40 / 930.00
Power (kW): 13,088
https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/ias/jsc/jupiter/tech
looks like its just a big Nvidia installation. IB, Ceph, K8s, H100s
Nice. How much does this cost?
> The scratch storage is based on 20 IBM Storage Scale 6000 systems utilizing NVMe disk technology, based on the IBM Storage Scale solution. With 29 PB of raw and 21 PB of useable capacity
That's also a lot of waste, isn't it?
RAID gonna RAID.
Edit: that might be speculative or a future addition cause they taped out less than 2 months ago https://www.eetimes.eu/sipearl-tapes-out-rhea1-processor-clo...
Which was delayed 2 years. I’m speculating this was supposed to be mostly or exclusively this but they needed a computer now. Or needed to spend the budget now.
[1] https://top500.org/resources/frequently-asked-questions/
Sure, the HQ of the core component(Nvidia) is incorporated in US but that too is a multinational effort.
Since when are supercomputers anything other than just the ability to afford a lot of hardware?
And so on, but that's just my 2 cents.