GENCI, the national agency in charge of implementing France's high-performance computing (HPC) digital simulation strategy, and CINES, the Centre Informatique National de l'Enseignement Supérieur (one of the 3 national computing centers), are proud to announce, alongside Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and AMD, the acquisition of the "Adastra" supercomputer and its availability to communities from next spring.
By 2022, Adastra will be one of Europe's most powerful supercomputers for open academic and industrial research, thanks to its latest-generation architecture that will complement the existing GENCI systems available at the 2 other national centers (TGCC du CEA and IDRIS of CNRS).
This new state-of-the-art "Adastra" supercomputer takes its name from the Latin locution "Per aspera ad astra" translated as "By arduous paths to the stars". It will provide French scientists with massive, innovative computing capacity for their complex numerical simulation needs, offering peak performance of over 70 PFlops/s, i.e. more than twenty times the computing power currently in production at CINES. At the same time, it will strengthen the position and resources of French research on the exciting road to Exascale.
After an open competitive dialogue procedure lasting 18 months due to the health situation, GENCI selected HPE's offer based around an HPE Cray EX system. This procedure was based in particular on technical criteria based on a total cost of ownership (TCO) assessment, drawing on both the sustained performance and energy efficiency of a relevant set of academic and industrial production applications, but also on a future innovative and integrated collaboration called a "progress contract", starting in November 2021, ahead of the Adastra delivery phase, for a period of 2 years.
Adastra will be based on a converged, balanced and modular computing architecture, with 2 complementary computing partitions, in response to the varied needs of hundreds of daily users:
A first partition featuring scalar computing known as manycores, each based on AMD's latest-generation EPYCTM "Genoa" processors, with 768 GB of DDR5 memory and a 200 Gbs Slingshot 11 NIC network link;
A second partition equipped with accelerated compute nodes, each based on a 3rdgeneration AMD EPYCTM processor with 256GB of DDR4 memory, 4 AMD InstinctTM MI250X OAM compute gas pedals, each with 128GB of HBM2e memory for a total of 512GB of fast memory, and 4 200 Gbs Slingshot 11 NIC network links.
The accelerated partition is expected to be made available in spring 2022, while the complete system will be operational in the last quarter of 2022.
The complete system will be federated by an HPE Slingshot high-speed Ethernet network developed for HPC and artificial intelligence (AI) needs, and an HPE Cray ClusterStor E1000 2-tier parallel file system under Lustre. The latter will offer high-speed storage capacity for the first tier, based on full flash technologies, of almost 2 Po at a bandwidth of 1.3 TB/s, and 24 Po at 250 GB/s for the second tier based on fast disk technologies.
With the aim of optimizing overall energy consumption, the solution provided by HPE is among the most efficient, cooling 97% of the heat generated by the machine via hot water liquid cooling combined with PUE of 1.10 leading to maximum sustained consumption limited to 1.59 MW.
Finally as part of the signed contract, HPE and AMD are engaged with CINES teams and user communities in a 2-year progress contract to jointly port, optimize and scale on Adastra a set of HPC and AI applications. Activities under the progress contract will be based on the AMD ROCmTM open-source platform, using HIP / OpenMP® programming models and compilation and analysis tools, thus contributing to the overall French effort to port scientific and industrial applications to Exascale.
"Adastra will enable French research teams to position themselves even more strongly on the path to Exascale, by preparing for the evolutions associated with these large-scale technologies and services. The achievement of this major milestone was made possible thanks to the expertise of the teams at CINES, HPE and GENCI," said Philippe Lavocat, CEO of GENCI.
"The arrival of this new Adastra supercomputer represents a twofold challenge for CINES: that of moving users en masse onto very powerful GPUs while keeping power consumption under control. The 21x gain in computing power is impressive compared with the current machine, while power consumption is only 1.5x higher for an eco-responsible HPC. The support around GPUs provided by AMD, using the HPE Cray EX system, enabling Adastra to scale up, is the key element that will ensure researchers' successful take-off towards the stars!" said Boris Dintrans, Director of CINES. For the Conférence des Présidents d'Universités (CPU), "this represents an important step in the digital strategy of French universities, both in its research component by making available a new-generation supercomputer for extreme simulations, but also to train and support students towards HPC" says Guillaume Gellé, Vice-President of the CPU.
"We are proud to have been selected by GENCI, which enables some of the world's leading research centers to support France's R&D efforts via advanced high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions using exascale-era technologies," says Justin Hotard, Vice President and General Manager for HPC and AI at HPE. "The design of the Adastra supercomputer is the result of a close collaboration between GENCI, CINES, HPE and AMD to provide a bespoke high-performance computing system to handle large volumes of data, including optimized AI and machine learning requirements, to further accelerate innovation."
"AMD EPYC processors and Instinct gas pedals are becoming the HPC industry's choice when performance, scaling and computational capacity aspects are required for demanding HPC needs aimed at solving the most pressing global problems. We are proud to be working with CINES, GENCI and HPE on the Adastra supercomputer, being very close to the arrival of Exascale in Europe" says Roger Benson, EMEA Sales Manager at AMD.
About GENCI
Created by public authorities in 2007, GENCI is a major research infrastructure, a public operator aiming to democratize the use of digital simulation through high-performance computing combined with the use of artificial intelligence, to support French scientific and industrial competitiveness.
GENCI pursues three missions:
Implement the national strategy for equipping French open scientific research with HPC, storage and massive data processing resources associated with AI technologies, in conjunction with the three national computing centers;
Support the realization of an integrated HPC ecosystem on a national and European scale;
Promote digital simulation and HPC among academic research and industry.
GENCI is a civil company owned 49% by the French State represented by the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, 20% by CEA, 20% by CNRS, 10% by the Universities represented by the Conference of University Presidents and 1% by Inria.
About CINES
CINES (Centre Informatique National de l'Enseignement Supérieur) is a national HPC center located in Montpellier and attached to French universities and higher education and research establishments (ESR). With dedicated HPC teams, it hosts and operates the Adastra supercomputer from GENCI on behalf of CPU (Conférence des Présidents d'Universités). In addition to HPC, CINES is also ESR's national perennial archiving center, and also hosts the IT resources of some fifteen establishments via its national datacenter label. https:/www.cines.fr
About Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is a global company offering platforms from the network edge to the cloud ("Edge to Cloud"), as a service, to help customers achieve results faster by unlocking the value of all their data everywhere. Building on decades of reinventing the future and innovating to advance the way we live and work, HPE brings to market innovative, open and intelligent technologies - including cloud services, traditional and high-performance computing, AI, intelligent edge, software and storage - delivering a seamless experience across all cloud and edge environments, enabling customers to develop new business models and modes of engagement and improve operational performance. For more information, visit: www.hpe.com.
About AMD
For more than 50 years AMD has been driving innovation in high-performance computing, graphics and visualization technologies - the indispensable building blocks for gaming, immersive platforms and data centers. Hundreds of millions of customers, leading Fortune 500 companies and cutting-edge research centers around the world rely on AMD technology every day to enhance the way they live, work and play. Around the world, AMD employees are focused on developing products that push the boundaries of what is possible. For more information on how AMD makes possible today and inspires tomorrow, you can visit AMD's (NASDAQ: AMD) website and Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter pages.
Contacts:
GENCI - Nicolas Belot - nicolas.belot@genci.fr - +33(0)760999510 I www.genci.fr
CINES - Boris Dintrans - boris.dintrans@cines.fr - +33(0)608726280 | www.cines.fr