by Nvidia and German research center Jülich have key data Jupiter announced: 23,752 GH200 make the supercomputer the fastest in Europe. There is a lot of performance not only for artificial intelligence (AI), the ExaFLOPs brand also applies to HPC applications. And all this with just 18.2 megawatts.
Very fast and efficient
Higher, faster and further without having to look at the electricity bill (and purchase costs) is very easy. But if power consumption doesn’t get completely out of control, it will automatically limit your choice of hardware.
Germany’s fastest supercomputer, which is also the new No. 1 in Europe, may also be better sold politically with a focus on efficiency; after all, (industrial) electricity and its price are a constant issue in this country. And since the public sector massively supports the Jupiter project, this should be the case: 250 million euros will come from the European supercomputing initiative EuroHPC JU and 250 million euros will also come from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (MKW NRW).
18.2 megawatts of power consumption at 1.0 ExaFPLOPS HPC performance is in the league that the current #1 system, Frontier, runs on AMD hardware. According to the May 2023 Top500, Frontier has so far offered 1.2 ExaFLOPS of performance at just over 20 megawatts. Recently, however, the Frontier has been further optimized; for a perfect comparison with Jupiter, we still have to wait for new data. Once again, Frontier and Jupiter make it clear one way or another: without a GPU, nothing works on supercomputers.
GH200 at its best
The GH200, also known as the Grace Hopper Superchip, is used in the JUPITER supercomputer by the tens of thousands, the abbreviation stands for “Joint Company Pioneering Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research“, installed, more precisely in 23,752 versions. The GPUs find their place in the so-called booster module.
For this purpose, Nvidia has built a new quad pack for the space-saving and efficient use of four GH200s, which Eviden (part of the Atos Group) will then install on the Atos BullSequana XH3000. A quad pack marks one node, two nodes are installed on a blade – this has been the rule recently with these solutions. Of course, the blade is liquid cooled, which is no longer possible with these compacted products that consume a lot of electrical energy.
The overall system will require the space of approximately 4 tennis courts and will utilize over 260 km of high-performance cabling
The cluster module will be equipped with SiPearl’s new Rhea processor designed and manufactured in Europe, a CPU with high memory bandwidth for complex workloads. The cluster and booster modules are dynamically operated as a unified supercomputer using ParTec’s ParaStation Modulo modular operating system.
Installation from the beginning of 2024
Jupiter installation will begin in early 2024. With construction, scientific users will have the opportunity to prepare and test the system as part of the Early Access Program. This allows for close collaboration between all parties involved to produce and configure the best possible version of the system for the scientific community, the partners explained in a press release.
Updated November 14, 2023, 9:52 am
ComputerBase received information about this item from Nvidia under NDA. The only requirement was the earliest possible publication date.
