Computing power meets sustainability: Two high-performance computers from North Rhine-Westphalia break international records
Two supercomputers from North Rhine-Westphalia are currently causing a stir in the international HPC world: “Otus” at the University of Paderborn and “JUPITER” at the Jülich Research Centre are among the most powerful and energy-efficient systems worldwide.
Otus, developed by Lenovo and pro-com Datensysteme GmbH, boasts an impressive 142,656 processor cores, 108 GPUs, and five petabytes of memory. Even before its official launch in the third quarter of 2025, the system achieved fifth place in the "Green 500"—the list of the world's most efficient supercomputers. Otus is operated by the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing (PC2) and enables computationally intensive applications ranging from atomistic simulations to quantum computing. Thanks to indirect free cooling and CO₂-free power operation, Otus also sets new standards in sustainability. The acquisition costs of approximately 14 million euros were jointly funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the German federal government.
JUPITER, Europe's fastest supercomputer, currently ranks fourth on the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful systems. Developed by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre and equipped with approximately 24,000 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper superchips, JUPITER is specifically optimized for AI training and complex simulations. With over 60 billion calculations per watt, it is also the most energy-efficient system among the top five. The waste heat generated is used for heating the building – a further step towards sustainable research. JUPITER is funded by the European EuroHPC initiative, the German federal government, and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Both systems mark a significant advance for scientific infrastructure in Germany and open up new opportunities for research, AI and sustainable technology development.
