Forschungszentrum Jülich

What they do

Forschungszentrum Jülich, between Cologne and Aachen, is a member of the Helmholtz Association with almost 7,450 employees from 114 countries and 987 million euros in revenue in 2023. It works on energy, information technology and the brain, the bioeconomy, and high performance computing and artificial intelligence across 14 institutes. In 2023 it published 2,511 papers and filed 93 new patent applications.

Why it matters

Jülich's supercomputing centre operates JUPITER, which on the November 2025 TOP500 list reached 1.000 exaflop per second on the standard benchmark. That made it the fourth exascale system in the world and the first outside the United States. Its development module, JEDI, topped the Green500 ranking of energy efficient machines.

Jülich also has a quieter claim on everyday technology. Peter Grünberg, a professor at its Institute for Solid State Research from 1972, discovered giant magnetoresistance in 1988, independently of Albert Fert in France. The first GMR read head reached hard drives in 1997 and quickly became standard, and the pair shared the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics. Grünberg patented the effect at once; by 2000 the licences had earned the centre more than ten million Deutschmarks.

Products to know

• JUPITER: Europe's first exascale supercomputer, inaugurated on 5 September 2025.
• Giant magnetoresistance, the physics inside hard disk read heads for more than two decades.

The German angle

JUPITER is owned by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, but half its funding comes from the German federal research ministry and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and it was built by a consortium of the Munich based ParTec and Eviden. Its warm water cooling is designed to feed waste heat into the campus heating network.

Sources

• Helmholtz Association: Forschungszentrum Jülich
• Nobel Prize: Physics 2007 press release
• wissenschaft.de: Siegeszug der Sandwiches
• TOP500: JUPITER becomes Europe's first exascale system