Atos to Deploy 12 Petaflop Supercomputer at Jülich in Germany

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Today Atos announced has a contract to deliver its a 12 Petaflop supercomputer to Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany. The BullSequana X1000 machine will be Germany’s fastest supercomputer and one the most powerful computers in the world.

The scientific community in Germany and Europe requires high-quality, flexible and scalable computing power as well as the matching IT infrastructure,” said Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Marquardt, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Forschungszentrum Jülich. “Complex simulation models and unstructured data sets with billions of data points – these are the challenges mastered by the new supercomputing module from Atos.”

Among numerous other activities, the BullSequana will be used in research for the Human Brain Project, which has as its goal to improve the understanding of the processes in the human brain through simulation.

As a highly flexible machine, the BullSequana is ideally suited for interdisciplinary high-level research. By selecting Atos as its partner, Forschungszentrum Jülich has become the first institution in the German research landscape to install this flagship supercomputer. The complete system will ultimately include ten BullSequana X1000 cells and is optimized for free cooling all year round, consuming 10 times less energy than previous generations of supercomputers.

The fact that Forschungszentrum Jülich has chosen Atos BullSequana supercomputer proves that our European technologies and solutions bring significant value and the necessary trust to more and more research institutes in the demanding challenges they have to tackle,” said Thierry Breton, Chairman and CEO of Atos. “In addition, they appreciate that our Atos BullSequana supercomputer is characterized by high energy efficiency and careful use of resources which provides state-of-the-art low carbon impact, necessary to reach exascale in a sustainable way.”

In addition to installing the supercomputer, Atos will be responsible for operations and on-site support, working closely with Munich-based specialized company ParTec, which will ensure system management with its ParaStation software stack and local staff.

Since 2010, our experts have been developing the software, which will in future create the union of several modules into a single system,” said Bernhard Frohwitter, CEO of ParTec. “In partnership with Atos, it is our goal to provide the leading software for Exascale.”

The supercomputer will be operated by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, a member of the Gauss Center for Supercomputing, and will be installed in Q2 2018 in Jülich, Germany. The system is financed by funds from the Ministry of Culture and Science of the German State of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter