Atos tossed €20m to build Max Planck Society supercomputer • The Register

Atos is constructing a brand new supercomputer for the Max Planck Society, a company conducting analysis into the pure sciences, life sciences, and humanities, in a contract valued at €20 million ($21.3 million).

The French multinational IT companies biz says it received the contract to construct a brand new machine based mostly on its newest BullSequana XH3000 compute platform. It will supersede the prevailing “Cobra” system operated by the Max Planck Society, which was additionally constructed by Atos. The substitute is predicted to offer thrice the appliance efficiency of its predecessor.

We requested Atos if this contract was put out to tender, or if it had merely been awarded the enterprise based mostly on having constructed the earlier system, however the firm declined to handle that time.

The unnamed supercomputer is to be put in on the Max Planck Computing and Information Facility (MPCDF) in Garching close to Munich, and can present high-performance compute amenities for lots of the institutes of the Max Planck Society.

Among the many initiatives it’s anticipated to offer processing help for are astrophysics, life science analysis, supplies analysis, and plasma physics.

“The computing energy required by scientific analysis is ever growing and we see an unabated want for high-performance computing capability,” MPCDF director Professor Erwin Laure mentioned in an announcement. “We need to present the absolute best help to our researchers of their work and have subsequently determined to modernize our high-performance computing advanced.”

The BullSequana XH3000 platform deployed on the MPCDF can be based mostly on AMD 4th Gen Epyc processors plus the AMD Intuition MI300A accelerator that mixes Epyc CPU cores and GPU cores. The ten racks this may initially fill will maintain a complete of 768 processor nodes and 192 accelerator nodes, in line with Atos.

As well as, the system will incorporate IBM Spectrum Scale storage, though Atos declined to specify the capability, plus Atos’s Direct Liquid Cooling (DLC) expertise.

The CPU nodes for the brand new supercomputer can be delivered within the third quarter of 2023, with set up of the GPU nodes anticipated within the first half of 2024.

Atos has additionally constructed the Lenoardo pre-exascale system on the Bologna Technopole in Italy, which is predicated on the BullSequana XH2000 structure. The corporate is constructing one other European pre-exascale system, the MareNostrum5 supercomputer at Barcelona Supercomputing Middle, which is able to use BullSequana XH3000 {hardware} as a part of its accelerator partition.

The enterprise is considered a powerful candidate to take the contract to construct JUPITER, the primary European exascale laptop. The European Excessive Efficiency Computing Joint Enterprise (EuroHPC JU) introduced a call for tenders with a purpose to choose a vendor in January. ®