Today Atosannounced that the company has won a contract with GENCI to deliver one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, planned for the end of 2017. A successor of the Curie system installed at the TGCC, the Bull Sequana supercomputer will havean overall power of 9 petaflopsforresearch purposes in France and Europe.

GENCI welcomes the acquisition of a new Atos supercomputer, which will actively help us to maintain the scientific competitivity of our French researchers. This highly anticipated acquisition indeed marks an acceleration in French investment in research organizations. This will also be of great advantage to f industrial companies, especially SMEs and start-ups. This high-performance equipment spearheads our commitment in the European research infrastructure PRACE (PartneRship for Advanced Computing in Europe) in which GENCI is highly involved in representing France says Philippe Lavocat, CEO of GENCI.

The new supercomputer will be made available to French and European researchers for use in academic and industrial fields that require extremely high computing and data processing power.

The applications for intensive computing are many and varied, such as climatology, where the supercomputer will help to model past, present and future meteorological conditions with incredible accuracy within the framework of international activities carried out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)[1]. When applied to life sciences, the high-performance computer will make it possible to work on the scale of basic chemical processes in molecular systems, thus paving the way for major advances in the personalization of medicine. In the energy industry, the supercomputer will not only optimize the process of combustion in motors and turbines, but also develop alternatives based on electricity with new-generation batteries in the wind, tidal and, in future, fusion power sectors. In astrophysics, only a supercomputer with this kind of power is capable of simulating the entire universe, thus putting us in a position to better understand its origin and evolution.

Based on the platform of the latest generation of the Bull Sequana X1000, which will eventually be capable of achieving an exaflop (a billion billion operations per second), the first installment of this supercomputer will have a peak computing power of 8.9 petaflops and a distributed memory capacity of almost 400 terabytes. An extension of its configuration is planned for 2019, when its computing capacity is set to increase to more than 20 petaflops.

Consisting of more than 124,000 computing cores, the supercomputer will benefit from the patented direct liquid cooling (DLC) technology used to cool the system down to room temperature, creating an energy saving of up to 40% compared to air cooling.

The design of Curies successor illustrates the expertise of Atos engineers, confirming Atos European leadership in the supercomputer domain. Following on from the Curie supercomputer, delivered in 2011 and already amongst the most powerful in the world, we are proud of the renewed trust that GENCI has placed in us to accompany them each day in their development of academic and industrial research states Philippe Vannier, Group Advisor for Technology at Atos.

The Atos group, leader of the supercomputer in Europe, has 22 supercomputers in the TOP500 of the most powerful machines in the world.

Specifications of the new supercomputer:

The entire solution functions under the new Bull SCS 5 environment based on the Linux Red Hat 7.x operating system. The solution also includes a cluster of Lustre multi-level storage capable of releasing a minimum output of 300 Gb/s (500 Gb/s over time) for a minimum required data storage of 5 Pio.

Atos will exhibit itsfull breadth of HPC solutions at ISC 2017 in Frankfurt, booth #D-1126.

Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

Follow this link:

Atos to Build 9 Petaflop Supercomputer for GENCI - insideHPC