Europe is about to get its most powerful supercomputer yet. Named Jupiter, this exascale system can perform over 1 quintillion operations every second, that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 calculations in a single second. Nvidia, the company behind Jupiter, says it will be the fastest in Europe when launched on Friday.

What does ‘exascale’ mean?

Exascale refers to the speed and computing power of a supercomputer. “Exa” means 1 quintillion, while flop stands for floating-point operations per second, a standard measure of computer performance. For comparison, a regular personal computer operates in the teraflop range, performing about 5 trillion calculations per second. This means exascale computers like Jupiter are roughly a million times faster.

“If a human were to perform one calculation per second, it would take them over 31 billion years to perform the number of operations that an exascale system does in one second,” the report said.

To make it even simpler, Gerald Kleyn, vice president of HPC & AI customer solutions for HPE, told Live Science, “An exaflop is a billion billion operations per second. You can solve problems at either a much larger scale, such as a whole planet simulation, or you can do it at a much higher granularity.”

Tim Danton, editor-in-chief of PC Pro, added, “The very first electronic computers back in the 1940s could perform roughly 500 operations per second, and this was considered fast at the time.”
Exascale computers like Jupiter are not just fast, they are enormous. According to EuroHPC JU, a European Union initiative that owns Jupiter, these machines can be 426 feet long, 8 feet tall, and weigh 420 tonnes.

Jupiter has already earned the fourth spot on the June 2025 TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers and is the most energy-efficient system among the top five.

Exascale computers can tackle some of the world’s toughest problems in record time. They can help discover new drugs, fight climate change, improve weather forecasts, and even model black holes.

With Jupiter, Europe takes a major step forward in the race for high-powered computing, opening doors to research and discoveries that were once thought impossible.