GENCI, the national operator in charge of implementing France's strategy for digital simulation through high-performance computing (HPC), and CINES, the Centre Informatique National de l'Enseignement Supérieur (one of the 3 national computing centers), are proud to announce the inauguration and commissioning of the "Adastra" supercomputer for the scientific and industrial research communities.
This new state-of-the-art supercomputer takes its name from the Latin phrase "Per aspera ad astra", translated as "By arduous paths to the stars". It will provide scientists with massive, innovative computing capabilities for their complex numerical simulation needs, offering a peak performance of over 74 PFlop/s, i.e. more than twenty times the computing power previously in production at CINES (Occigen supercomputer). Adastra will thus help strengthen the position and resources of French research as it explores new scientific fields.
In a context of geopolitical tensions and global energy changes, France is today commissioning Adastra, which has reached 3rd place in the Green 500, an international ranking of the most efficient computing systems. The need to optimize energy resources has been a key concern for GENCI and the three national computing centers for several years. The competitive dialogue procedure that led to the acquisition of this supercomputer imposed, in particular, technical criteria based on an assessment of the total cost of ownership (TCO), drawing on both the sustained performance and the energy efficiency of a relevant production system meeting important academic and industrial applications.
Adastra is now one of Europe's most powerful supercomputers, thanks to its innovative architecture, which will complement GENCI's existing systems available at the 2 other national centers (CEA's TGCC and CNRS's IDRIS). Adastra is in fact based on a converged, balanced and modular computing architecture, with 2 complementary computing partitions, and access to data storage, in response to the varied needs of hundreds of daily users.
Innovative technology for digital power at the service of science and innovation,Adastra represents a major new asset for the French and European scientific communities. Regularly mobilized for numerical simulations used in particular in the work of the IPCC, national high-performance computing resources, converged with artificial intelligence and soon with prototype quantum computing devices benefit all fields of scientific activity and innovation: the fight against global warming, health, clean transport, biodiversity, decision support, human and social sciences, biology, chemistry, physics, astrophysics... Adastra's new computing capacities are currently being appropriated by scientific communities as part of the Grands Challenges program. Academic and industrial researchers will be able to access them as part of open research via "DARI".
Finally, and this is essential, the acquisition, commissioning and use of Adastra rely on a community of men and women. The coordination for the acquisition, the resources deployed as part of the progress contract between CINES, HPE, its partner AMD and GENCI, the support set up, the user scientists: they are all links in a community with diverse and indispensable expertise, at the service of science and innovation.
The Adastra community is made up of men and women.