Maisons-Laffitte, France, 6 July 2021 – SiPearl, the designer of the microprocessor for the European exascale supercomputer, announced the appointment of Jean-Marc Denis as chief strategy officer. Previously, he was head of strategy, big data and security within the Atos group. Since 2018, he chaired the European Processor Initiative (EPI) consortium from which SiPearl was born.
Throughout his career in high performance computing (HPC), Denis has built an international network, institutional, industrial, academic and scientific, from which SiPearl will benefit. He will have responsibility for the company’s policy towards its partners; in particular, the major European supercomputing centers, in order to support the success of its first generation of microprocessor, Rhea, intended for HPC. To this end, he will lead the HPC ecosystem of SiPearl with activities such as creation of centers of excellence for target customers to optimize specific applications (meteorology, climatology, energy management, epidemiology, fluid mechanics, etc.).
Before joining SiPearl, Jean-Marc Denis was Head of Strategy, Big Data and Security within the Atos group. He joined Bull in 2004 as Head of HPC Operations with the mission of initiating the product strategy of this market segment and remained with Atos when they acquired Bull. While in Atos he contributed alongside Philippe Notton to the launch in December 2018 of the European Processor Initiative (EPI) consortium, whose objective is to promote the return of high-performance microprocessor technologies in Europe. EPI is at the origin of the creation of SiPearl. Jean-Marc Denis was President of EPI since its inception.
After starting as a research engineer at Matra Défense in 1990, he held various strategic positions in the HPC ecosystem at Silicon Graphics, Compaq, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard. Passionate about the architecture of supercomputers, for several years Jean-Marc Denis taught courses dedicated to students in Master 2 in computer science at the University of Reims ChampagneArdennes.
About SiPearl
Created by Philippe Notton, SiPearl is the company that is bringing to life the European Processor Initiative (EPI) project, designing the high-performance, low-power microprocessor for the European exascale supercomputer. This new generation of microprocessors will enable Europe to set out its technological sovereignty on the strategic markets for high performance computing, artificial intelligence and connected mobility. SiPearl is developing and will market its solutions through close collaboration with its 27 partners from the EPI – scientific community, supercomputing centres and leading names from the IT, electronics and automotive industries – which are its stakeholders and future clients. It is supported by the European Union.
