Atos: Eviden will increase the performance of the Jean Zay supercomputer to support the development of AI in France

(Boursier.com) — Following on from Emmanuel Macron’s announcement, during Vivatech in June 2023, the Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif (GENCI) and the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), under the leadership of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, have selected Eviden to provide a major extension of the capabilities of the Jean Zay supercomputer, funded as part of France 2030.

GENCI and the CNRS chose Eviden to provide a new computing infrastructure, powered by Nvidia processors, and integrated into the national supercomputer fleet. This extension of the Jean Zay calculator will increase its peak computing power, increasing it from 36.85 to 125.9 PFlop/s. In doing so, the available computing capacities will be multiplied by 3.5 in double precision (for high-performance computing) and by 13 if reduced or mixed precision is used as for artificial intelligence. In addition, a new storage infrastructure will make it possible to read/write at high speed and make the associated models and datasets available.

After adaptation work, the NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU partition of Jean Zay, the GENCI supercomputer operated by the Institute of Development and Resources in Scientific Computing (IDRIS) of the CNRS, will be installed by Eviden in April and will be entirely available to users in early summer 2024.

This development is part of the announcement made by the President of the Republic, on June 14, 2023, at the Vivatech exhibition, to support the development of sovereign artificial intelligence, in particular generative AI. To this end, 40 ME were allocated to GENCI. This exceptional grant is also accompanied by 10 ME to strengthen and extend the human resources of the National Research Program in Artificial Intelligence (PNRIA) and support AI communities. This involves guaranteeing over time the quality of the service provided by the CNRS network of AI support engineers, which helps AI communities carry out their projects on Jean Zay. This provision of public computing resources to scientific communities will contribute to increasing the capabilities of the French AI sector in international competition.