Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) today announced it is building what it said will be one of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers to be installed and operated next year at CINES (National Computing Center for Higher Education), one of the three high performance computing (HPC) centers in France. The system was procured by GENCI, a national French agency which invests and provides HPC resources to support France’s academic and industrial research communities.
The new supercomputer, which GENCI and CINES have named “Adastra,” will be built using the HPE Cray EX system, engineered to support next-generation supercomputing and AI needs such as with exascale-class systems that will deliver up to 10X more performance than today’s most powerful supercomputers. As part of Adastra’s design, HPE will also feature 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct MI200 accelerators.
At more than 70 petaflops of performance, Adastra will deliver more than 20X faster performance than CINES’ existing supercomputer.
“This new Adastra supercomputer is double challenging for CINES: massively switch users to boosting GPU while overcoming the electrical consumption. The 21x jump in computing power dizzying compared to the current machine, while power consumption only grows by 1.5x for green HPC,” said Boris Dintrans, director of CINES. “The GPU support provided by AMD, using the HPE Cray EX system, allowing Adastra to ramp up, is the key element that will ensure the success takeoff of researchers to the stars!”
The system has the following elements:
- Adastra has two partitions: for modeling, simulations and data- and image-intensive workflows it will use optimized 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors combined with AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators in one partition, and next generation AMD EPYC processors, codenamed “Genoa,” in the second partition
- For congestion control for larger workloads the system will utilize HPE Slingshot, the high performance Ethernet fabric
- Expanded storage using the Cray ClusterStor E1000 storage system and HPE Data Management Framework
- For centralized monitoring and management Adastra will use HPE Performance Cluster Management using the HPE Cray Programming Environment
