GENCI, the French national agency for High Performance Computing, and CINES, the National Computing Center for Higher Education (one of the three French national centres), together with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and AMD, have unveiled the acquisition of ‘Adastra’ supercomputer and its upcoming deployment during next spring.
At 2022 horizon, Adastra will be one of the most powerful supercomputers for academic and industrial open research in Europe, thanks to its state-of-the-art architecture, which will complement GENCI systems already available at the two other national computing centres (TGCC for the CEA and IDRIS for the CNRS-INS2I).
This new leading-edge system ‘Adastra’ takes its name from the Latin sentence ‘Per aspera ad astra‘ meaning ‘Through hardships to the stars’. Adastra will indeed provide scientists with innovative and large-scale computing capabilities on the difficult paths of research with more than 70 PFlops/s, more than 20 times computing power of the current system in production at CINES. This will strengthen the position and the means of French research on the exciting path to Exascale.
GENCI has selected the HPE offer based on the HPE Cray EX system after an open competitive dialogue which happened during the pandemic period, for 18 months. The selection has been based on a TCO approach, relying both on sustained performance and optimised energy consumption for full-fledged scientific and industrial applications representative of a typical production workload and an innovative process of integrated collaboration called ‘contract of progress’, starting for two years in November, earlier than the delivery of the system.
Thereby, Adastra will be based on a balanced and modular converged architecture with two complementary compute partitions, to answer the various needs of hundreds of daily users.
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