Atos to Provide GENCI with Supercomputer

Atos, through its technology brand Bull, has won a contract with GENCI (Grand Équipement National de Calcul Intensif) to deliver the company a supercomputer, planned for the end of 2017. A successor of the Curie system installed at the TGCC (Très Grand Centre de Calcul of the CEA in Bruyères-Le-Chatel), the Bull Sequana supercomputer has an overall power of 9 petaflops and can carry out 9 million billion operations per second. It will be used for research purposes in France and Europe.

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. 

Based on the platform of the latest generation of the Bull Sequana X1000, 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 direct liquid cooling (DLC) technology used to cool the system down to room temperature.

Supercomputer Specs

All of the computing nodes consist of nine Sequana cells and are equipped with the latest generation of Intel Xeon Skylake-EP processors and Intel Xeon Phi KNL manycore processors for a total of over 124,700 cores. The peak computing power is in the range of 8.9 petaflops (6.86 petaflops in x86_64 technology and 2.08 petaflops in accelerator technology). The distributed memory capacity is in the range of 400 Tb. The direct liquid cooling technology makes it possible to cool the machine with hot water. The entire solution functions under the new Bull SCS 5 environment based on the Linux Red Hat 7.x operating system.

For more info, visit Atos.

Sources: Press materials received from the company.