Jülich, Germany · 10 June 2025
NVIDIA announced at the ISC 2025 high-performance computing conference that the JUPITER supercomputer, powered by the NVIDIA Grace Hopper platform, has become the fastest supercomputer in Europe. The system, hosted at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre at the Forschungszentrum Jülich facility in Germany, delivers more than a 2x speedup for high-performance computing and AI workloads compared with the next-fastest system on the continent.
JUPITER ranked fourth on the June 2025 TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers and is on track to become Europe's first exascale system, capable of running 1 quintillion FP64 operations per second. The system is owned by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, a European Union initiative established to develop a world-class supercomputing infrastructure across Europe.
Architecture and Specifications
JUPITER comprises nearly 24,000 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, interconnected with the NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking platform. The system is built on Eviden's BullSequana XH3000 liquid-cooled architecture and is expected to reach over 90 exaflops of AI performance once fully operational.
The GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip combines NVIDIA's Hopper GPU architecture with the Arm-based Grace CPU on a single module, connected by a high-bandwidth coherent interconnect. This design eliminates the traditional PCIe bottleneck between CPU and GPU, enabling the system to handle both large-scale AI model training and traditional HPC simulation workloads within a unified architecture.
Scientific Applications
JUPITER is designed to serve a broad range of scientific and industrial research domains. The system's computing power is directed toward several priority areas:
| Research Domain | Application | NVIDIA Platform |
|---|---|---|
| Climate and weather modeling | High-resolution real-time environmental simulations and digital twin of Earth | Earth-2 |
| Quantum computing research | Quantum algorithm and hardware development | CUDA-Q, cuQuantum |
| Computer-aided engineering | AI-driven simulation for product design and manufacturing | PhysicsNeMo, CUDA-X, Omniverse |
| Drug discovery | AI models for pharmaceutical research and biomolecular science | BioNeMo |
The system's ability to handle both AI training and traditional scientific simulation within a single architecture represents a shift in how supercomputing resources are deployed. Rather than maintaining separate systems for AI workloads and conventional HPC simulations, JUPITER allows researchers to move fluidly between both paradigms.
European Sovereignty and Access
JUPITER was delivered by an Eviden-led consortium, with the system designed, built, and installed in less than nine months — a timeline that Emmanuel Le Roux, senior vice president and global head of advanced computing at Eviden, Atos Group, described as demonstrating the technological leadership of the European consortium.
"With JUPITER's extreme performance, Europe has taken a giant leap into the future of science, technology and sovereignty," said Anders Jensen, executive director of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. "JUPITER's computing power will serve as a catalyst for scientific discovery, propelling foundational research across the continent in fields as diverse as climate modeling, energy systems and biomedical innovation."
Thomas Lippert, codirector of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, emphasized the system's role in advancing the frontier of foundation model training and high-performance simulation, enabling researchers across Europe to tackle challenges of unprecedented complexity.
Kristel Michielsen, codirector of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, noted that JUPITER will substantially advance quantum algorithm and hardware development, with hybrid quantum-HPC computation benefiting from tools such as the NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform and the NVIDIA cuQuantum software development kit.
Context and Significance
The announcement positions Europe within the top tier of global supercomputing. The world's fastest supercomputer as of June 2025 remains El Capitan, hosted at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States and powered by AMD Instinct MI300A APUs. JUPITER's fourth-place global ranking, combined with its energy efficiency leadership, marks a significant milestone for European computing infrastructure.
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, framed the announcement within the broader context of AI-driven scientific discovery: "AI will supercharge scientific discovery and industrial innovation. In partnership with Jülich and Eviden, we're building Europe's most advanced AI supercomputer to enable the leading researchers, industries and institutions to expand human knowledge, accelerate breakthroughs and drive national advancement."
German and other European researchers can apply for access to JUPITER through the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking's regular access mode call for proposals.
Sources
- NVIDIA Newsroom, "NVIDIA Powers Europe's Fastest Supercomputer," 10 June 2025
- Forschungszentrum Jülich, "JUPITER Supercomputer Propels European Computing Power," June 2025
- EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, call for proposals for regular access mode
- TOP500 List, June 2025 edition
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