Today Atos announced that the company has successfully deployed Tera 1000, the most powerful European general-purpose supercomputer with a computing power of 25 petaflops and a very competitive power consumption of only 4 megawatts.
Developing an exaflop-class supercomputer by 2020 is a necessity for some of the defense programs implemented by the CEA/DAM. To reach this capacity, technological breakthroughs are needed – most notably to maintain low levels of energy consumption, one of the key challenges in the high-performance computing market, but also to ensure smooth information flows and process the significant volumes of data produced by increasingly precise simulations of multi-physical, multi-dimensional phenomena.
Deployed in two stages at the CEA center in Bruyères-le-Châtel (Île-de-France), Tera 1000 has a 25-petaflop computing capacity and best-in-class energy efficiency for a large range of applications – an achievement made possible through the use of technologies developed by Atos for its line of BullSequana X supercomputers. BullSequana uses an innovative cooling technology, using streams of lukewarm water circulating in close proximity to processors. A single BullSequana module can deliver almost three quarters of the computing power of the Tera 100, the supercomputer that was formerly in use at the CEA/DAM, with an energy efficiency improved by a factor of 25.
Once again, the partnership between Atos and the CEA/DAM has allowed a major technological milestone in the power capacities of supercomputers,” said François Geleznikoff, director of defence applications at the CEA. ” With the Tera 1000, we have very significantly increased the quality that digital simulations can attain for defence applications, but also for research and industry uses. This step opens the way to the exaflops in the coming decade.”
Tera 1000 consists of two computing partitions:
- The first one, relying on Intel Xeon V3 processors, has been in production since 2016
- The second one uses latest-generation BullSequana, based on Intel Xeon Phi(TM) Knight Landing processors connected with a very-high-performance Bull X Interconnect(BXI) network, a result of the R&D collaboration between the CEA/DAM and Atos
- The second layer of Tera 1000 marks a breakthrough in the parallel setups used for its 540,000 computing cores. Its architecture prefigures those that will be used in the next CEA/DAM computer, EXA1, by 2020.
Atos is very proud to help France and Europe gain international prominence in supercomputers, and to provide the CEA with the computing power they need to develop quality innovative research,” said Pierre Barnabé, Chief Operating Officer of Atos’ Global Big Data & Security Division. “This spot in the top-500 ranking reflects the successful collaboration between Atos and the CEA, and is one of the best examples of Atos’ technological excellence in high-performance computing.”
