Commissioned at the end of 2019, Jean Zay is one of Europe's most powerful converged supercomputers. It is freely accessible for open research in HPC and AI. To date, more than 700 academic and industrial research projects (from startups to SMEs and large corporations) have used its resources to harness the power of Artificial Intelligence. An analysis of the projects carried out on this supercomputer also shows great diversity in the fields in which AI is used: automatic language processing (ALP), vision, decision support, smart cities, health and medicine (the fight against Covid-19 and cancer, for example), neuroscience, robotics, social sciences, chemistry, particle physics, astrophysics, climatology and many others.
To help researchers make the most of Jean Zay's resources, the IDRIS application support teams have been strengthened with nine AI experts from the CNRS and d'Inria, bringing the total to 21.
Already among the most powerful converged supercomputers in Europe, Jean Zay will see its configuration evolve further to reach a total of over 3,152 GPUs by early 2022, comprising both NVIDIA V100 and NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. The power of the former should make it possible to double the current computing capacity dedicated to Artificial Intelligence on Jean Zay.
This extension will offer 52 HPE Apollo 6500 Gen 10 servers each featuring 8 NVIDIA A100s (a total of 640 GB of HBM2 memory per server), particularly well suited to large-scale NLP or vision models.
This extension will be a major asset for the development of AI in France and Europe. The deployment of this new computing capacity will enable the development of innovative, even groundbreaking, research projects on a global scale, following the example of the BigScience and COVID_19 projects.
It will also be part of the innovative scheme set up by IDRIS and the Établissement public d'aménagement Paris-Saclay (EPAPS), to recycle the waste heat produced by the Jean Zay supercomputer to supply the heat and cold exchange network of the Paris-Saclay Urban Campus, providing thermal coverage equivalent to 1,000 homes. A first in Europe!
Also, the deployment of this extension will help to strengthen French and European scientific power in the field of AI, while reinforcing the convergence between AI and HPC and initiating original responses to energy and environmental imperatives.
Financed by the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, this extension, scheduled for installation in January 2022, is the result of joint work between GENCI, IDRIS-CNRS, HPE and NVIDIA.
Philippe Lavocat, Chairman and CEO of GENCI, said a few minutes before the opening of SuperComputing 2021 that "Jean Zay's extension strengthens France's position among the leading countries in academic and industrial research in artificial intelligence. This is one of the key missions of GENCI, in line with its strategic plan. This is a testament to the Jean Zay supercomputer in the scientific community and the relevance of the response provided to its AI needs."
According to Antoine Petit, Chairman and CEO of the CNRS: "Artificial intelligence and its applications are one of the CNRS's priorities described in its objectives and performance contract (2019-2023). Strengthening computing resources at Jean Zay, which is hosted and operated by IDRIS, the CNRS's national high-performance computing center, is essential to meet multiple emerging challenges in French research communities, including those at the CNRS. CNRSproduces significant efforts to provide the best possible environment for IDRIS and the best support for users ".
Renaud Vedel, Coordinator of the National Strategy for AI: "On the recommendation of the Villani report, the French strategy for AI has placed equal access to supercomputers as key. All researchers who publish according to the rules of open science, from public laboratories but also from private teams and particularly startups, can benefit, with the added accompaniment of application support teams. And we can see today that this double bet is a winner: it accelerates the spread of AI across all scientific disciplines and technological fields, and offers them new tools for discovery. We are delighted to accompany GENCI and IDRIS, who have successfully committed themselves, in this new expansion "
About GENCI
Created by the public authorities in 2007, GENCI is a major research infrastructure, a public operator aiming to democratize the use of digital simulation through high-performance computing combined with the use of artificial intelligence, to support French scientific and industrial competitiveness.
GENCI pursues three missions:
Implement the national strategy for equipping French open scientific research with HPC, storage and massive data processing resources associated with AI technologies, in conjunction with the three national computing centers;
Support the creation of an integrated HPC ecosystem on a national and European scale;
Promote digital simulation and HPC to academic research and industry.
GENCI is a non-trading company owned 49% by the French State represented by the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, 20% by CEA, 20% by CNRS, 10% by the Universities represented by the Conférence des Présidents d'Université and 1% by Inria.
About CNRS
The Centre national de la recherche scientifique is one of the world's most recognized and renowned public research institutions. For more than 80 years, it has been committed to excellence in recruitment, and has developed multi- and inter-disciplinary research throughout France, Europe and the rest of the world. Committed to the common good, it contributes to France's scientific, economic, social and cultural progress. The CNRS is first and foremost 32,000 men and women, more than 1,000 laboratories in partnership with universities, schools and other research organizations, representing more than 120,000 people and 200 professions who advance knowledge by exploring life, matter, the Universe and the workings of human societies. IDRIS is the CNRS national center for high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI), serving the scientific communities that use extreme computing. IDRIS serves and supports a user community made up of over 2,200 researchers and engineers working on around 1,000 projects from all scientific disciplines, offering a top-quality applied support service (guidance, consulting and expertise).
For more information: www.cnrs.fr
About Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is a global company offering platforms from the network edge to the cloud ("Edge to Cloud"), as a service, to help customers achieve results faster by unlocking the value of all their data everywhere. Building on decades of reinventing the future and innovating to advance the way we live and work, HPE brings to market innovative, open and intelligent technologies - including cloud services, traditional and high-performance computing, AI, intelligent edge, software and storage - delivering a seamless experience across all cloud and edge environments, enabling customers to develop new business models and modes of engagement and improve operational performance. For more information, visit: www.hpe.com.
Contacts
GENCI - Nicolas Belot - nicolas.belot@genci.fr - +33(7)60999510 I www.genci.fr CNRS - press office - presse@cnrs.fr