Peeling the Covers Off Germany's Exascale "Jupiter" Supercomputer

Summary

The newest of the exascale-class supercomputer to be profiled in the Top500 rankings in the June list is the long-awaited “Jupiter” system at Forschungszentrum Jülich facility in Germany. We finally have a sense of how this hybrid CPU-GPU machine will perform, although some of the details on its configuration are still not nailed down publicly. Jupiter is the first exascale system to be completed under the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking of the European Union, and the fact that it is not using a custom CPU and XPU created by European companies, as was originally hoped, and is basically an Nvidia machine top to middle – bottom would include Nvidia storage, which it hasn’t acquired yet but will – speaks volumes about difficult it is to start from scratch to achieve chip independence for Europe. But, the Universal Cluster module will be based on the “Rhea1” Arm server CPU created by SiPearl, which is a step in the direction of independence for European HPC. The Jupiter machine is built by Eviden, the HPC division of Atos that was going to be spun out but which the company has had second – and good – thoughts about doing, and ParTec, the German HPC system designer and installer. Like its predecessor, the “Jewels” system that was first deployed in 2018 and upgraded a few times over the years, Jupiter is a hybrid supercomputer with blocks of CPU and GPU compute with other kinds of storage and acceleration blocks linked into it. With Jewels, the Cluster Module was installed first, based on Intel “Skylake” Xeon SP processors linked with 100 Gb/sec EDR InfiniBand from the then-independent Mellanox Technologies with everything installed in a BullSequana X1000 system from Eviden. In 2020, a BullSequana XH2000 system loaded up with AMD “Rome” Epyc CPUs and Nvidia “Ampere” GPU accelerators and called a Booster Module, was added to Jewels using 200 Gb/sec HDR InfiniBand. Here is the honeycomb diagram for Jupiter, showing its modular components: The vast majority of floating point and i...