ESI Opens New European HPC Center

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ESI’s Point of Delivery for Cloud Computing, based in Teratec Campus

ESI’s Point of Delivery for Cloud Computing, based in Teratec Campus

Today the French ESI Group announced the opening of its new European HPC Center. The datacenter is now based on the Teratec Campus, an ideal location to launch collaborative High-Performance Computing projects as it is in the vicinity of Europe’s biggest HPC center: the CEA’s Très Grand Centre de Calcul. The new datacenter will effectively act as ESI’s POD (Point of Delivery), serving all ESI offices across Europe as a platform for ESI’s new software development and engineering services alike. ESI teamed up with Legrand, the global specialist in electrical and digital building infrastructures to meet the technical challenges surrounding this project.

ESI successfully completed the implantation of its new datacenter, in collaboration with Legrand,” said Vincent Chaillou, COO, ESI Group. “Aside of guaranteeing Uninterrupted Power Supply to support our software and services operations, this intelligent infrastructure is set to adapt to ESI’s evolving needs and computational loads. It delivers a scalable, adaptable infrastructure, ready to anticipate the next big technological challenges, including Big Data evolutions and the Internet of Things.”

For years, Legrand has been supplying integrated solutions for lighting, energy, networks, and access management in buildings. Present in more than 80 countries with a workforce of over 36,000, the Group’s mission is to design, develop, and market electrical and digital systems that are both simple and innovative. Since 2009, Legrand has intensified its activity in the UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) sector, as required for efficiently operating datacenters aimed at supporting HPC activities, especially with the acquisition of S2S in France.

To build its new datacenter at Teratec, ESI worked with Legrand Datacenter Solutions, a branch specialized in delivering adequate answers to the numerous challenges inherent to supercomputing: from energy efficiency to cooling, security, and scalability. ESI also teamed up with Minkels, a company belonging to the Legrand Group and specializing in datacenter hardware, including housing, UPS, cooling, monitoring and power distribution solutions, together with their partner Cap Ingelec, strong of 20 years’ experience in data centers.

In most buildings, the economic and/or safety and security issues necessitate reliable availability of energy and data and the costs associated with a loss of operation can be very substantial”, comments Pascal Perrin, Datacenter Business Development Manager at Legrand. “Our solutions ensure the electrical and digital supply of the data center at all times.” Continuous availability of power supply is of uttermost importance to make sure ESI can run large HPC calculations smoothly, as required to deliver projects at the right time to ESI’s industrial customers.

ESI is now equipped with a Cloud Computing PoD to run state of the art calculations, as required to leverage our developments and engineering studies in the field of Virtual Prototyping,” said Chaillou. “This new PoD actively contributes to achievement of ESI’s vision: by granting our customers access to HPC and Cloud Computing, and by democratizing the use of such technologies, we propose a new model to our industrial customers — empowering them to deliver disruptive innovations.”

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