Europe's fastest supercomputer is finally getting its domestic silicon infusion
Bull, the system builder behind JUPITER, takes delivery of SiPearl's long-awaited Rhea1 CPUs
Europe's most potent supercomputer, Jupiter, is set to receive a boost of domestic silicon from French chip designer SiPearl. On Tuesday, SiPearl began delivering its Rhea1 CPUs to Bull for integration into the system. Jupiter, which went live last year, became the European Union's inaugural exascale supercomputer, currently holding the fifth spot on the Top500 list of publicly known supercomputers.
However, this achievement was not achieved using European silicon, as the system was powered by 24,000 American-made GH200 superchips from Nvidia. SiPearl's Rhea1 chips will power a second CPU-only section of Jupiter, marking a significant milestone in sovereign supercomputing. Despite being designed for high-performance computing and scientific workloads, the Rhea1 chip has been outpaced by newer Arm core designs.
With 61 billion transistors and 64 GB of HBM2e memory per processor, the Rhea1 is well-suited for applications that benefit from efficient data access. Thomas Lippert, director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, praised the delivery as a major turning point for the EU's HPC ecosystem.
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