Thierry Breton from Atos showcases the new Joliot-Curie supercomputer.
GENCI has inaugurated their new Joliot-Curie supercomputer at CEA in France. Based on the Atos BullSequana architecture, the system is rated at 9.4 petaflops of peak performance. The system boasts 4.5X increase in computing capacity with half the power consumption of its predecessor.
Joliot-Curie is France’s third supercomputer ranked in the Top 500 in terms of power, just behind Tera-1000-2 and Pangea. Its computing power is equivalent to 75,000 desktop computers and will support researchers for projects requiring heavy computing and data processing. This supercomputer offers truly astounding RAM capacity with 400 terabytes. It also includes a 5-petabyte data storage capacity with a 300 GB/s bandwidth, remote data visualization and virtualization services. This makes Joliot-Curie an especially well-balanced machine that meets the needs both for large-scale computer simulations and for processing the large amounts of data generated.
Joliot-Curie computing power will be more than doubled in 2020 to reach 22 petaflops of peak performance. At that point in time, it will likely become the third most powerful research supercomputer in Europe and no. 1 in France.
Computer simulation and high-performance computing have now become essential scientific tools to improve knowledge, design and decision-making processes in fundamental and applied research fields, and an increasing number of industrial sectors. Thanks to the investment made by GENCI, Joliot-Curie will ensure that France meets its commitments in terms of computing power made available to European researchers in the context of the PRACE European computing infrastructure.
Supercomputers have greatly improved over time and are now used in various research fields since they allow for computer simulation to be applied across all academic disciplines. Joliot-Curie has already been tested as part of the Grands Challenges (Great challenges), organized by GENCI at the TGCC, by running major simulations and other applications.
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