The achievement marks not just a numerical milestone but a fundamental shift in what supercomputers can do. With over 24,000 of NVIDIA’s GPUs, JUPITER can perform tasks at a scale and speed that previously belonged in the realm of theory. It is already ranked the most powerful computing system in Europe and the fourth worldwide, a placement that underlines its disruptive potential in a global race where computing power is fast becoming the raw material of science, industry and artificial intelligence.

A new generation of computing

Exascale computing represents an order-of-magnitude leap from petascale systems that dominated the last decade. In practice, this means modelling complex systems – from planetary climate dynamics to nuclear fusion reactions – with a level of detail never before possible. For artificial intelligence, it unlocks the training of massive language and multimodal models in weeks rather than months, while allowing researchers to experiment with architectures and parameters that would have been computationally prohibitive.

What distinguishes JUPITER further is its modular design. Its “Booster” partition, developed by Eviden, is optimised for massively parallel workloads such as deep learning and physics simulations. A complementary “Cluster” module using the much-expected European SiPearl CPU, due online later, will focus on tasks requiring lower latency. The design allows different types of research to coexist on a single platform, a flexibility rarely achieved at this scale.

A step toward sustainable supercomputing

One of the perennial criticisms of supercomputing has been its appetite for electricity. Here too JUPITER attempts to change the paradigm. The system uses direct liquid cooling, circulating water across components to minimise energy losses. The waste heat will be channelled into the Jülich campus’s heating system, effectively turning the supercomputer into an energy recycler. It is an experiment in how ultra-powerful computing can coexist with the environmental constraints of the 21st century.

The global landscape

Only the United States and China have deployed comparable exascale systems so far. America’s Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was the first to break the barrier in 2022, while China is widely believed to operate two exascale machines, though details remain opaque. JUPITER’s arrival therefore places Atos Group’s Eviden into an elite technological circle, showing that the race for computing supremacy is no longer a purely trans-Pacific contest.

Industry observers note that beyond academic simulations, such systems are becoming the backbone of technological disruption worldwide. Drug discovery pipelines, autonomous driving algorithms, aerospace design, and real-time financial modelling all increasingly depend on access to this level of performance. With JUPITER, Atos has placed itself at the heart of these transformations.

The exascale frontier

The exascale frontier has long been seen as symbolic – akin to the first supersonic flight or sequencing of the human genome. But if JUPITER proves anything, it is that the milestone is only the beginning. What matters now is the disruptive potential: accelerating research, reshaping industries, and redefining the limits of machine intelligence.

In that sense, JUPITER is not just a European achievement. It is a global signal that the architecture of computing is being rewritten – and that the pace of innovation is accelerating.

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