New call for tender: Procurement of JUPITER Exascale Supercomputer

JUPITER is set to be the first system in Europe to surpass the threshold of one billion billion calculations per second. This next-generation European supercomputer represents a significant technological milestone for Europe and will have a major impact on European scientific excellence.

With such unprecedented capacity, JUPITER will support the development of high-precision models of complex systems and help to solve key societal questions regarding, for example, climate change, pandemics, and sustainable energy production, while also enabling the intensive use of artificial intelligence and the analysis of large data volumes.

The system, installed on the campus of Forschungszentrum Jülich will be owned by the EuroHPC JU and operated by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC).

JUPITER will be available to serve a wide range of European users, no matter where in Europe they are located, in the scientific community, as well as industry, and the public sector. Access to the computing resources of the new machine will be jointly managed by the EuroHPC JU and Germany in proportion to their investment

More details

The EuroHPC JU will conclude a contract with the successful tenderer in order to acquire, deliver, install and maintain this high-end supercomputer. Therefore, the prospective contractors should have proven experience of acquiring, delivering, installing and maintaining supercomputers in similar environments as the ones required in this procurement procedure.

The solutions to be procured are expected to outperform existing solutions regarding several of the following aspects:

• performance/TCO;
• programmability and usability;
• versatility;
• system stability;
• power and energy efficiency;
• computing density.

The estimated total value for the call is EUR 273 000 000. The EuroHPC JU will fund 50% of the total cost of the new machine and the other 50% will be funded in equal parts by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (MKW NRW).

The closing date of the call is 13th February 2023, 17:00 CET.

More information can be found in the call section.

Background

In December 2022, the EuroHPC JU announced the signature of a hosting agreement with JSC. JSC has been selected as a EuroHPC JU hosting entity as a result of a call for expression of interest launched in December 2021.

The EuroHPC JU is a legal and funding entity, created in 2018 and reviewed in 2021 by means of Council Regulation (EU) 2021/1173, with the mission to:

• develop, deploy, extend and maintain in the EU a world-leading federated, secure and hyper-connected supercomputing, quantum computing, service and data infrastructure ecosystem;
• support the development and uptake of demand-oriented and user-driven innovative and competitive supercomputing system based on a supply chain that will ensure components, technologies and knowledge limiting the risk of disruptions and the development of a wide range of applications optimised for these systems;
• widen the use of that supercomputing infrastructure to a large number of public and private users and support the development of key HPC skills for European science and industry.

In order to equip Europe with a world-leading supercomputing infrastructure, the EuroHPC JU has already procured eight supercomputers, located across Europe. Five supercomputers are now operational:  LUMI in Finland, LEONARDO in Italy, Vega in Slovenia, MeluXina in Luxembourg, Discoverer in Bulgaria and Karolina in the Czech Republic. Two more supercomputers are also underway:  MareNostrum5 in Spain and Deucalion in Portugal.