France's SiPearl Delivers First Batch of Rhea1 Processors for European Exascale Supercomputer

en.Wedoany.com Reported - French chip company SiPearl has delivered the first batch of Rhea1 processor samples to Bull, which has begun integrating them into the BullSequana XH3000 high-performance computing platform. They will subsequently be used in the CPU cluster module of the JUPITER supercomputer operated by Germany's Jülich Supercomputing Centre. JUPITER was procured by the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking and is Europe's first supercomputer to reach exascale computing capability.

The Rhea1 features 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores, each integrating 2 256-bit Scalable Vector Extension units; a single processor package also integrates 4 stacks of HBM high-bandwidth memory and 4 DDR5 interfaces, and provides 104 PCIe Gen5 lanes. SiPearl disclosed that the chip contains more than 61 billion transistors and is aimed at high-performance computing, AI inference, and data-intensive applications.

The Rhea1 delivered this time will enter the Cluster Module CPU partition of JUPITER, forming a modular computing architecture with the existing GPU Booster partition. Bull is responsible for integrating the processors into the BullSequana XH3000 platform and continuing to advance CPU blade development and full-system integration. SiPearl stated that the JUPITER project is also the first order Rhea1 has received, and this batch of equipment deliveries will generate the product's first significant revenue.

The Rhea1 is still in the benchmarking and sampling stage, and SiPearl is continuing to verify performance in the laboratory. Complete performance data is planned to be published this autumn, with the official product launch scheduled for the end of 2026. After JUPITER integration is completed, the Rhea1 will become the first European-designed CPU deployed in a European self-developed supercomputing platform.

JUPITER is hosted and operated by Germany's Jülich Supercomputing Centre, and the system adopts a modular architecture. The CPU cluster handled by the Rhea1 will mainly undertake general-purpose and high-memory-bandwidth computing tasks and will operate in coordination with the GPU-accelerated partition. SiPearl's next-generation Rhea2 processor is also planned for use in France's Alice Recoque exascale supercomputer.