Technological Masterpiece Making the Impossible Possible: Supercomputer Jupiter Simulates 50-Qubit Quantum Computer

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Researchers from the Jülich Research Center and Nvidia have, for the first time, achieved the simulation of a universal quantum computer with 50 qubits on the European supercomputer Jupiter. This requires a working memory of two million gigabytes.

It was not long ago, in September 2025, that the European supercomputer system Jupiter was officially (and symbolically) inaugurated at the Jülich Research Center. Jupiter is the first European system capable of breaking the exascale barrier—theoretically meeting the requirements, and practically, Jupiter and its booster extension achieved an Rmax of 793.40 PFlops/s in the summer of 2025. In a few days, Jupiter will once again demonstrate its computing power as the November measurements for the Top500 list take place.

Until then, the Jupiter system can boast another record. Researchers from the Jülich Research Center and Nvidia have successfully simulated a universal quantum computer with 50 qubits. This largest fully simulated qubit count to date surpasses the previous record of 48 qubits and demonstrates the capabilities of heterogeneous CPU/GPU architectures as well as newly developed data compression methods.

New Record for Quantum and High-Performance Computing

The full simulation of a universal 50-qubit system is considered a milestone in the interplay between quantum research and high-performance computing. Such a state would theoretically require around 2 petabytes—or two million gigabytes—of memory, which is hardly feasible on classical systems. A qubit system doubles its memory requirement with each additional qubit, which is why 50 qubits already encompass around 1.12 trillion complex amplitudes.

The Jupiter system achieved this through the integration of thousands of compute nodes and the close coupling of CPU and GPU. The work is based on a joint contribution by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) and Nvidia in the preprint "Universal Quantum Simulation of 50 Qubits on Europe’s First Exascale Supercomputer".

To reach the 50-qubit threshold, three key innovations were employed:

• Memory relief through CPU-GPU coupling: The available memory was utilized beyond the typical GPU framework.
• Adaptive byte compression: A specially developed encoding reduced memory requirements by a factor of eight.
• Optimized communication: Network traffic was dynamically distributed, enabling thousands of compute nodes to work efficiently together.

For the first time, these methods enable the simulation of quantum algorithms in a size range that was previously reserved exclusively for specialized quantum processors. With the 50-qubit simulation, Jupiter demonstrates the potential of exascale systems for quantum research. Future access via the Juniq platform is intended to be open to additional research institutions and industrial partners. The project also represents an intermediate step toward hybrid working models, where quantum and high-performance computers are used together. (sb)

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