Europe’s long effort to design its own high-performance processor has reached the point where hardware changes hands. The first Rhea1 chips from SiPearl are now with the French integrator Bull, which will build them into JUPITER.
That machine is destined for a German research campus, and the handover shifts the part out of validation and into a customer system.
Inside each package sit 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores. Count the logic around them and the total lands at 61 billion transistors, a figure the company says no earlier server chip designed on the continent has matched. Early benchmark results look solid in a subset of workloads.
Bull’s work now moves to a BullSequana platform, a necessary stage before the system is assembled from modules. Procurement ran through the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, and the host site is the Juelich Supercomputing Centre.
Inside the machine, the Rhea1 silicon takes the CPU role beside a separate partition of GPUs. Splitting the two is meant to give schedulers a way to send data-heavy jobs to the side with more cores and memory bandwidth.
EuroHPC JU executive director Anders Dam Jensen called the transfer a milestone for European supercomputing sovereignty.
