JUPITER, Europe's first exascale supercomputer at Germany's Forschungszentrum Jülich, runs on NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips and NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networking. As the international supercomputing community gathered at ISC in Hamburg, four major projects demonstrated the practical impact of exascale computing: mapping the human brain at cellular scale, simulating Earth's climate at 1-kilometer resolution, building AI systems for next-generation wireless networks, and simulating a universal 50-qubit quantum computer.

Thomas Lippert, director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre and professor at Goethe University Frankfurt, stated: "With JUPITER, Europe doesn't just join the exascale era — it leads it, across the widest range of science and AI of any system worldwide." All four projects share a common theme: scientific problems that were out of reach on previous hardware are now tractable at exascale.

The Jülich Brain Atlas project, led by neuroscientist Katrin Amunts and computer scientist Christian Schiffer at the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine, has produced CytoNet, a foundation model for brain microarchitecture analysis. The human brain contains 86 billion neurons and about 100 trillion connections between them. Understanding brain function at single neuron resolution has been impossible until now. Training on JUPITER took under five days using 6.5 petabytes of data from 21 post-mortem brains on 4,096 NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips. Amunts explained: "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. That changes what neuroscience will be, and JUPITER is what makes that sentence possible to say today." The team's next step is building an AI agent for brain researchers using NVIDIA Nemotron 3 120B and other open models.

A novel ICON configuration developed by researchers from ETH Zurich, the German Climate Computing Centre, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, NVIDIA, Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, and the University of Hamburg won the Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling at SC25 last November. ICON is the first model to simulate a coupled Earth system at 1-kilometer resolution, including ocean, atmosphere, land, biogeochemistry, and the full carbon cycle across all components. Running on 20,480 NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips on JUPITER, the model simulated approximately 146 days of real climate in 24 hours of compute, setting a world record in global climate simulation. Daniel Klocke, computational infrastructure and model development group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, noted: "At a global resolution of just 1 kilometer, many of these interactions emerge directly from the laws of physics rather than being approximated. This gives us an unprecedented view of how the atmosphere, ocean and biosphere work together, helping us understand the processes driving our changing climate."

In March, Ericsson and Forschungszentrum Jülich announced a collaboration to develop AI for the continued evolution of 5G and for 6G networks, with JUPITER serving as the compute engine for large-scale AI model training and testing. The collaboration targets brain-inspired architectures designed to handle complex network operations at far lower energy costs, with research priorities including AI models for Ericsson's radio and core networks, energy-efficient AI inference at the radio edge using neuromorphic approaches, and modular supercomputing architecture concepts.

Researchers at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, working with the jointly run NVIDIA Application Lab, achieved a world first by fully simulating a universal 50-qubit quantum computer, surpassing the previous 48-qubit record. The simulation leveraged JUPITER's coherent, tightly coupled CPU-GPU memory architecture, which allows data exceeding GPU limits to spill seamlessly into CPU memory with minimal performance loss. This simulator, JUQCS-50, will be accessible through JUNIQ, the quantum computer user facility at JSC, led by Kristel Michielsen, director of JSC and professor at the University of Cologne.

The range of science running on JUPITER—from neurons to atmosphere to wireless infrastructure to quantum—demonstrates that exascale computing has moved from a research category into production.