Exascale
Within the Jules Verne consortium, France (represented by GENCI as Hosting Entity and CEA as Hosting Site) together with The Netherlands (represented by SURF) will finalyze with EuroHPC JU the tender package for the procurement of EuroHPC’ 2nd Exascale system during the second half of 2024 following the formal Hosting Agreement to be signed soon.
Artificial Intelligence
- New partition for Jean Zay
GENCI and IDRIS (CNRS) teams are installing together with Eviden a new partition of Jean Zay the French converged HPC/AI supercomputer. This new extension based on Eviden’s new Sequana AI 1200H will offer, across 14 compute racks, a total of 364 hybrid servers, each with 2 Intel Sapphire rapids CPUs coupled with 4 NVIDIA H100 80 GB SXM5 and fueled by 4 NVIDIA Mellanox 400 Gb/s EDR network links. The storage environment is also being fully upgraded with a tiered Lustre DDN solution allowing a first level with 4.3 PB of flash drives (up to 1.5 TB/s) and a second level of 39 PB of fast drives, accessible from all the Jean Zay partitions.
This new extension will start operating early June and is highly expected by the French AI community, since GENCI in 2023 served more than 1,100 AI projects from academia and industry in many fields (LLM, vision, explainable AI, robotics… to AI For Science).
- Adastra’s evolutions
Adastra offered its capabilities to nearly 20 Grand Challenges projects and is now in full production. CINES and GENCI will again expand the configuration of Adastra, the leading national AMD-based hybrid HPC system, with a new partition using AMD MI300 APUs during the summer 2024. This new extension will serve the needs of HPC and AI workloads by using the APUs design, the most integrated memory design between scalar and accelerated compute units, to boost the migration from scalar to hybrid resources.
Quantum Computing
- EuroQCS and HPCQS
While waiting the upcoming result of the EuroQCS-France procurement, launched by EuroHPC together with France, Ireland, Romania and Germany for a photonic quantum computer, GENCI is installing with Pasqal at TGCC (CEA) a first analogue quantum computer to be coupled with its Joliot Curie supercomputer in the context of the HPCQS European project. HPCQS aims at making available 2 first 100+-qubit analogue quantum computers from Pasqal in France and Germany (hosted by FZJ) coupled to HPC supercomputers, develop a hybrid HPC-QC software stack and explore several use cases while making these systems available to European scientists.
During ISC24, HPCQS will announce an extension of the software stack with the support of emulation services from several European startups including C12 (Callisto), Alice & Bob (Felis), QPerfect (MIMIQ), but also Fraunhofer FOKUS (Qrisp) in addition to the ones from Eviden (Qaptiva), Pasqal (Pulser) or Quandela (Perceval) already available.
- HQI
In France, HQI (the French Hybrid HPC Quantum Initiative) together with Teratec and Le Lab Quantique organized in EDF R&D (Saclay) on April 24th a workshop to announce the first results of the Paris Region Quantum Pack (Pack Quantique) projects, a tailored programme allowing end-users from the industry (like TotalEnergies, EDF, Thales, Airbus, Allianz or SMEs like Qubit Pharmaceuticals) to work on concrete 2-year proof-of-concept collaborations using hybrid quantum computing directly with experts from quantum startups and academia. Such projects are benefiting from the support of the Paris Region, who funds up to 45% of each PoC.
Since the inception of the program in 2020, 12 projects have been launched, with an overall value of €10M (with €4M co-funding from the Region). This event, which attracted more than 130 attendees, was the opportunity for WelinQ, Pasqal and Quandela to announce a much larger project with EDF, aiming to scale out by leveraging quantum links to couple multiple QPUs.
In the coming weeks, HQI will also launch a call for proposals to set up a network of 5 Maisons du Quantique (Houses of Quantum) across 5 different French regions. The aim is to co-fund lighthouse physical places to organize meetups and quantum hackathons, host quantum startups, possibly include clean rooms as well as expand the Paris Region’s Quantum Pack throughout the country.
- HQI @ Viva Technology
HQI will be present at Vivatech 2024 (booth L12), the largest worldwide IT and consumer fair with the only-one quantum booth together with 15 startups and large groups in the field of quantum computing, quantum communications and quantum-safe cryptography.
Don’t miss the pitch sessions on GENCI’s (K40) booth at ISC24 !
About GENCI
Created by the public authorities in 2007, GENCI (Grand Équipement National de Calcul Intensif) is a major research infrastructure. This public operator aims to democratise the use of digital simulation through high performance computing associated with the use of artificial intelligence, and quantum computing to support French scientific and industrial competitiveness.
GENCI is in charge of three missions:
- To implement the national strategy for the provision of high-performance computing resources, storage, massive data processing associated with Artificial Intelligence technologies and quantum computing, for the benefit of French scientific research, in conjunction with the 3 national computing centres (CEA/TGCC, CNRS/IDRIS, France Universités/CINES).
- Supporting the creation of an integrated ecosystem on a national and European levels
- Promoting digital simulation and supercomputing to academic research and industry
GENCI is a civil company 49% owned by the State represented by the Ministry in charge of Higher Education and Research, 20% by the CEA, 20% by the CNRS, 10% by the Universities represented by France Universités and 1% by Inria.
Contact
Nicolas Belot I nicolas.belot@genci.fr I +33 (0) 7 60 99 95 10