Europe is moving forward in the supercomputer space, with two new exascale machines set to come online. Jupiter will be installed at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Munich, with assembly set to start as early as Q1 2024. Scotland will be home to the UK’s first exascale supercomputer, to be hosted at the University of Edinburgh, with installation commencing in 2025. An exascale supercomputer can run calculations at speeds of one exaflop (1,000 petaflops) or greater. On completion, these two new supercomputers will land in the top percent of the world’s high-performers.

The Top 500 list was as of June topped by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which is capable of 1.1 exaflops. Jupiter will run on Arm cores instead of the x86 architecture more prevalent in the majority of the global supercomputer installations, including Frontier.

Exascale supercomputers “can perform a billion billion floating point operations per second (measured as one exaflop),” writes TNW, reporting on the UK system. This type of high-performance computing power “can help solve problems in areas such as fusion energy, material science, drug discovery, climate change, and astrophysics.”

“This new UK government funded exascale computer in Edinburgh will provide British researchers with an ultra-fast, versatile resource to support pioneering work into AI safety, life-saving drugs, and clean low-carbon energy,” UK Science, Innovation and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan said in an announcement, adding that it is expected to “drive economic growth and create the high-skilled jobs of the future.”

“Jupiter is a project of the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), which is working with computing firms Eviden and ParTec to assemble the machine,” writes ExtremeTech, noting that it “will have Rhea Arm processors and Nvidia GPUs.”

ARM design, initially popular for mobile devices, has more been improved to the point where it is now used for more powerful systems. “Apple has recently finished moving all its desktop and laptop computers to the ARM platform, and Qualcomm has new desktop-class [ARM] chips on its roadmap,” ExtremeTech reports.

The unnamed UK exascale supercomputer will be built on the x86 platform by a consortium that includes Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), AMD and Nvidia. HPE is providing the infrastructure and integration. AMD is supplying the CPUs and the GPUs are from Nvidia.

The UK news follows an announcement earlier this month that Bristol has been selected as the site for the UK’s new AI supercomputer, Isambard-AI. Both are part of an investment of £900 million (equivalent to more than $1.1 billion) in next-generation computing for the UK.

The UK is preparing to host what it calls the first global AI Safety Summit, November 1-2 at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire.