Pre-exascale Architectures: OpenPOWER Performance and Usability Assessment for French Scientific Community

Gabriel Hautreux from GENCI gave this talk at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference. “The talk will present the OpenPOWER platform bought by GENCI and provided to the scientific community. Then, it will present the first results obtained on the platform for a set of about 15 applications using all the solutions provided to the users (CUDA,OpenACC,OpenMP,…). Finally, a presentation about one specific application will be made regarding its porting effort and techniques used for GPUs with both OpenACC and OpenMP.”

European Supercomputing Centers Adopt Joint Procurement Process

Some of Europe’s leading supercomputing centers have joined forces to create a buyers group that will enable joint public procurement of new HPC systems. “The new partnership of four public HPC centers (BSC, CINECA, JSC, and GENCI), located in four different countries (Spain, Italy, Germany, and France) means that new supercomputers can be procured through a market consultation for the purchase of HPC systems. This group will operate under as part of the Public Procurement of Innovative Solutions for High-Performance Computing (PPI4HPC) project.”

Atos to Build 9 Petaflop Supercomputer for GENCI

Today Atos announced that the company has won a contract with GENCI to deliver one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, planned for the end of 2017. A successor of the Curie system installed at the TGCC, the Bull Sequana supercomputer will have an overall power of 9 petaflops for research purposes in France and Europe.

EU/European HPC Plans for the Next Decade

Bob Sorensen from IDC presented this talk at the HPC User Forum. In a recent study, IDC assessed the EU’s progress towards their 2012 action plan and made recommendations for funding exascale systems and fostering industrial HPC in the coming decade.

GENCI to Collaborate with IBM in Race to Exascale

Today GENCI announced a collaboration with IBM aimed at speeding up the path to exascale computing. “The collaboration, planned to run for at least 18 months, focuses on readying complex scientific applications for systems under development expected to achieve more than 100 petaflops, a solid step forward on the path to exascale. Working closely with supercomputing experts from IBM, GENCI will have access to some of the most advanced high performance computing technologies stemming from the rapidly expanding OpenPOWER ecosystem.”