Hewlett Packard Enterprise Builds New Supercomputer for France’s GENCI-CINES to Advance Nation’s Open Science and R&D

By: Hewlett Packard Enterprise via Business Wire

November 15, 2021 at 08:00 AM EST

France’s national HPC centers gain significantly powerful supercomputer using advanced high performance computing and AI solutions to make breakthrough discoveries in medicine, energy, and materials science

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) today announced that it is building one of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers to be installed and operated at CINES (National Computing Center for Higher Education), which is one of the three high performance computing (HPC) centers in France. The new supercomputer 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, a purposely engineered platform 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 powerful compute with 3^rd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors and accelerated compute with newly launched AMD Instinct™ MI200 accelerators to tackle and process data and image-intensive workloads.

By combining significantly advanced capabilities in modeling, simulation, AI, machine learning and analytics, Adastra will help scientists and researchers harness insights faster, with more accuracy, to advance research targeting key focus areas, including:

Developing renewable energy to improve France’s energy security, reducing the need to import fuels and overall, conserving the nation's natural resources
Discovering new, highly effective materials that can be used to create next-generation batteries
Advancing a range of medical research to aid drug design and treatment

“We are honored to have been selected by GENCI, which empowers some of the world’s leading research centers, to deliver advanced high performance computing (HPC) and AI solutions using exascale-era technologies in support of propelling France’s R&D efforts,” said Justin Hotard, senior vice president and general manager, HPC and AI, at HPE. “The design of the Adastra supercomputer is a result of a close collaboration between GENCI, CINES, HPE and AMD to deliver a specialized, high-performing system to harness larger data sets, including optimizing AI and machine learning needs, to accelerate discovery and innovation at a faster rate.”

With the latest HPC and AI technologies, Adastra will deliver more than 20X faster performance than CINES’ existing supercomputer at more than 70 petaflops of performance to process complex scientific data, at larger scale.

"Adastra will allow French research teams to position themselves even more strongly on the path to exascale, and to prepare for the change associated with extremely large-scale resources and new technologies/services,” said Philippe Lavocat, chairman and CEO of GENCI. “The realization of this major step came from the dialogue and the expertise of CINES, GENCI and HPE teams.”

“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 is 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!”

“AMD EPYC Processors and AMD Instinct Accelerators continue to demonstrate exceptional innovation and growing adoption in the HPC industry when performance, scale and capabilities are needed for the demanding HPC workloads,” said Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center and Embedded Solutions Business Group, AMD. “We are proud to be working with CINES, GENCI and HPE on the Adastra supercomputer to that aim to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges.”

Adastra Strengthens France’s HPC and AI Resources for New Generation of Insights

By using the HPE Cray EX system, which delivers end-to-end exascale era technologies, spanning compute, software, storage and networking, GENCI’ and CINES’ scientists, researchers and engineers will achieve the following benefits:

Powerful compute and accelerated compute to improve modeling, simulations and data and image-intensive workflows using optimized 3^rd 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.
Addressing demands for higher speed and congestion control for larger data-intensive and AI workloads with HPE Slingshot, the world’s only high performance Ethernet fabric designed for HPC and AI solutions
Expanded storage to support and share complex workloads in modeling, simulation and AI using the Cray ClusterStor E1000 storage system from HPE and HPE Data Management Framework
Enabling fine-grained centralized monitoring and management for optimal performance with the HPE Performance Cluster Management, a system management software solution, and a fully integrated software suite to optimize HPC and AI applications using the HPE Cray Programming Environment

Adastra will be based in CINES, in Montpellier, France. The system will be installed and put into use in 2022.

About Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) is the global edge-to-cloud company that helps organizations accelerate outcomes by unlocking value from all of their data, everywhere. Built on decades of reimagining the future and innovating to advance the way people live and work, HPE delivers unique, open and intelligent technology solutions as a service. With offerings spanning Cloud Services, Compute, High Performance Computing & AI, Intelligent Edge, Software, and Storage, HPE provides a consistent experience across all clouds and edges, helping customers develop new business models, engage in new ways, and increase operational performance. For more information, visit: www.hpe.com