European Processor Initiative achieves significant sovereignty contribution

The European Processor Initiative (EPI), a project with 30 partners from 10 European countries, aiming to make the EU independent in HPC chip technologies and HPC infrastructures, has announced that it has delivered a significant European sovereignty contribution with valuable business impacts.

One of its key partners, Eviden, the Atos Group business leading in advanced computing, as part of a consortium together with ParTec, the German modular supercomputing company, have won an emblematic contract with EuroHPC to provide the very first Exascale supercomputer in Europe, named JUPITER. SiPearl, another key EPI partner, will provide its brand new Rhea1 processor, an outcome of the EPI initiative, the first HPC-dedicated European processor on the market with exceptionally high memory bandwidth. JUPITER is a EuroHPC JU supercomputing infrastructure that will be operated by Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany.

Mission to ensure European sovereignty

This is a major milestone for SiPearl and EPI in fulfilling the European Union’s mission to ensure European sovereignty through the return of high-performance, low-power processor technologies in Europe. It will contribute to the development of high-precision models of complex systems and artificial intelligence applications to solve strategic, scientific, industrial and environmental challenges with a low-carbon footprint.

JUPITER will be composed of two partitions, a highly scalable GPU accelerated Booster Module and a general-purpose Cluster Module with high memory bandwidth processors. The general-purpose Cluster Module will be based on SiPearl’s first-generation processor, Rhea1. Using the Arm Neoverse V1 platform, the Rhea1 is characterized by very high memory bandwidth, extraordinary compute performance and efficiency for an unmatched Byte/Flop ratio. It will help JUPITER run complex simulations and artificial intelligence applications to solve strategic, scientific, industrial and environmental challenges with a low-carbon footprint. Rhea1 will be available in 2024.

“I am proud of this outstanding achievement, and I value the EPI team’s cooperation. Together we are paving the way towards Europe’s technological sovereignty. This is creating an unprecedented momentum for EPI to deliver its promises: European processors and accelerators for European exascale supercomputers. EPI is committed to supporting Eviden, Jülich, and SiPearl, key members of EPI, as well as Partec that is close to us, to make JUPITER a great European success,” said Eric Monchalin, Chairman of the EPI Board.