The first European-designed processors are arriving at the JUPITER supercomputer in Jülich, Germany. French company SiPearl began shipping its Rhea1 chips on Wednesday to Bull, which is building the system.
JUPITER came online last year as Europe's first exascale supercomputer, meaning it can perform a quintillion (10^18) operations per second. It currently ranks fifth on the global Top500 list. Its main section, the Booster, runs on 24,000 Nvidia GH200 chips made in the United States.
What Rhea1 brings
Each processor has 80 cores based on Arm's Neoverse V1 design and 61 billion transistors. Alongside four DDR5 memory channels, it carries 64 gigabytes of fast HBM2e memory with 1.8 terabytes per second of bandwidth.
The new CPU section will have 1,300 nodes with 2,600 processors in total. Together they are expected to deliver about 5 petaflops. The chips target scientific workloads that are a poor fit for GPUs.
The view from Jülich
"Its high memory bandwidth is particularly well suited to applications that benefit from efficient access to large amounts of data," says Thomas Lippert, director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre.
Anders Dam Jensen, executive director of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, said the delivery "demonstrates what Europe can accomplish by bringing together research, industry and world-class infrastructure."
