At ISC, JUPITER Shows What Exascale Science Looks Like

Europe's first exascale supercomputer - running on NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips - is mapping the brain, modeling climate, advancing 6G AI and breaking records in quantum computing simulation. JUPITER, Europe's first exascale supercomputer at Germany's Forschungszentrum Jülich, runs on NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips and NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networking - and it's had a busy year. As the international supercomputing community gathers at ISC in Hamburg this week, four projects running on JUPITER point to what exascale computing can actually do: map the human brain at cellular scale, simulate the entire Earth's climate at 1-kilometer resolution, build AI systems for the next generation of wireless networks and simulate a universal 50-qubit quantum computer.

Four projects, detailed below, share a throughline: scientific problems that were out of reach on previous hardware are now tractable at exascale. A Foundation Model for Mapping the Brain The Jülich Brain Atlas project - anchored at Jülich's Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine with partner Helmholtz AI, partner hospital and other Helmholtz institutions - has produced CytoNet, a foundation model for brain microarchitecture analysis.

The complexity of the human brain is astonishing. With 86 billion neurons and about 100 trillion connections between them, understanding brain function at single neuron resolution has been out of reach, until now. The research is led by neuroscientist Katrin Amunts and computer scientist Christian Schiffer at INM-1, Jülich's Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine.

The model learns from brain imaging data at cellular scale, building a map that links individual cell structures to broader patterns of brain organization and function. Training ran on JUPITER in under five days, using 6. 5 petabytes of data from 21 post-mortem brains on 4,096 NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips.

A paper describing the work is available on arXiv . "For the first time, we're not just using AI to analyze the brain - we're building an agent that can think through the experiment itself," said Katrin Amunts, director of INM-1 at Forschungszentrum Jülich and professor of brain research at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. "That changes what neuroscience will be, and JUPITER is what makes that sentence possible to say today.

" That agent is the team's next step: building an AI agent for brain researchers - integrating multimodal reasoning, language interfaces and Q&A capabilities using open models, including NVIDIA Nemotron 3 120B , working toward AI assistants that can help scientists interrogate brain data directly. Climate at Kilometer Resolution A novel ICON configuration - developed by researchers at the ETH Zurich, German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ), Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, NVIDIA, Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) and the University of Hamburg - won the Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling at SC25 last November. The breakthrough isn't resolution alone.

ICON is the first model to simulate a coupled Earth system at 1-kilometer resolution, with ocean, atmosphere and land, biogeochemistry and the full carbon cycle, with carbon exchanged, between all components. It can simulate and visualize complete ecosystems, such as phytoplankton blooms and zooplankton grazing. Previous systems could model pieces of this; ICON runs it all.

This allows a much more precise and complete simulation of the Earth - observable at that level of detail for the first time. Running on 20,480 NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips on JUPITER, the model simulated roughly 146 days of real climate into 24 hours of compute, setting a world record in global climate simulation.