The AMD Helios rack, along with the Adastra system at CINES equipped with AMD Instinct™ MI250X GPUS, EPYC™ CPUs and AMD Instinct™ MI300A APUs, will provide scientific and industrial users with early access to next-generation AMD AI technologies. This will support French and European research communities in porting and developing their HPC and AI applications for using the upcoming Alice Recoque supercomputer as well as Bull to prepare the arrival of this second Exascale system in Europe in 2027.
AMD Helios is a state-of-the-art AI platform, powered by AMD Instinct™ MI455X GPUs, 6th Gen AMD EPYC™ CPUs, advanced AMD Pensando™ networking technologies, and unified by the AMD ROCm™ open software ecosystem.
This deployment will also strengthen collaboration between AMD and the French and European HPC and AI community on the continued development of the AMD ROCm ecosystem, while demonstrating the platform’s potential to support the future deployment of European AI Gigafactories.
“AMD Helios provides an open, rack-scale blueprint for the next generation of AI and HPC infrastructure,” said Andrew Dieckmann, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Data Center GPU Business Unit, AMD. “By bringing Helios to Europe with Bull and GENCI, we are giving researchers and industrial users early access to next-generation AMD technologies and the ROCm open software ecosystem, helping accelerate application readiness for Alice Recoque and future European AI Factories.”
We’re pleased to see these first tangible milestones on the path to Alice Recoque. The deployment of Helios by the end of 2026 at CINES, in collaboration with GENCI, will bring together partners and user communities while supporting the early adoption of new technologies. It marks a concrete step towards accelerating and scaling Europe’s HPC and AI infrastructure.” said Bruno Lecointe, head of HPC, AI and Quantum at Bull
"This deployment of AMD Helios at CINES, which is expected to be the first in Europe, is a decisive step in preparing our national and European scientific communities for the arrival of Alice Recoque, the 2nd European Exascale Supercomputer,” said Mickaël Krajecki, CEO of GENCI. “By giving researchers early access to the latest AMD AI technologies, we ensure that French and European users will be ready to fully exploit the performance of our future exascale supercomputer from day one, while reinforcing our sovereign AI compute ecosystem.”
Following the announcement last November of Alice Recoque, the 2nd European Exascale system by EuroHPC and the Jules Verne consortium (headed by GENCI and CEA for France, SURF for the Netherlands and GRNET for Greece) provided by Bull and including unified nodes based on the latest AMD AI technologies, all the partners started to engage with national and European users communities to prepare the inception of the system in the second half of 2027 at TGCC, the computing center of CEA.
This project includes the previous launch of a joint Application Support Team (AST) led by CEA, federating experts from the three French national computing centers (TGCC, IDRIS from CNRS and CINES from French Universities), SURF, Maison de la Simulation and GENCI. Additionally, Bull and AMD will establish centers of excellence on the convergence of Exascale and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at scale.
About GENCI
Created by the public authorities in 2007, GENCI (Grand Équipement National de Calcul Intensif) is a major research infrastructure, a public operator aiming to democratize 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 pursues three missions:
- Implement the national strategy of equipping France with high-performance computing, storage and massive data processing resources associated with AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies and future quantum computing technologies for the benefit of French and European open scientific research, drawing on the three national computing centers;
- Support the development of an integrated ecosystem on a national and European scale
- Promote the use of numerical simulation, artificial intelligence and quantum computing among academic and industrial teams through open research.
GENCI is a civil company owned 49% by the French State represented by the Ministry in charge of Higher Education, Research and Space, 20% by CEA, 20% by CNRS, 10% by the Universities represented by France Universités and 1% by Inria.