ENGINEERING

GENCI has acquired two new supercomputers, Turing and Ada, developed by IBM and installed at l'IDRIS, le centre de calcul du CNRS, one of three national centers of extreme calculations. With this investment, GENCI will allow the French scientific community, in January 2013, to meet the challenges in academia, government and industry and to prepare for the arrival of future supercomputing architectures.

In many areas, the issues related to supercomputing for modeling and numerical simulation are colossal. They are not only for scientists, but they also have a societal impact (energy, health, environment), economic and financial (industrial competitiveness) and ethical (biology, personalized medicine). In addition, modeling and simulation are increasingly used as tools for decision support essential for a number of critical situations, such as the prevention of natural disasters, global warming, the spread of pandemics, and industrial accidents.

 

To meet these challenges, the need for computational power is higher and always generates new challenges such as:

 

• Taking into account the high energy constraints on architectures.

• Adapting scientific supercomputing applications to new massively parallel architectures.

• the use of large volumes of data generated which has become the object of intense activity and now considered as the fourth pillar of science.

 

"With this new investment, GENCI strengthens the capacity of national computing architectures with additional machines with the CINES Jade supercomputer and Curie and Titanium at CEA. In total, this is a combined capacity of more than 1.6 petaflops that are now at the disposal of French scientists, a gain of a factor 80 in five years," says Catherine Rivière, GENCI.

 

These two new supercomputers designed by IBM together account for more than 1 petaflops with minimal energy consumption.

 

• The first supercomputer, named in homage to Turing Alan Turing is considered the father of modern computing, is a BlueGene/Q with 836 teraflops. With 65,536 IBM POWER supercomputing cores, it foreshadows the supercomputers of tomorrow through its compute density and low power consumption.

 

• The second supercomputer, named in memory of Ada Ada Lovelace, a pioneer in computer programming, has 230 teraflops of power, and consists of 336 large nodes each organized around 32 Intel cores. It will accommodate the most demanding applications in terms of memory capacity.

 

Seven days weather forecasts, constitution of matter, the birth of the universe, discovering new medicines, new energy sources, new materials and nanotechnology, decoding the human genome are all advances resulting from supercomputing and multidisciplinary work based on multiple collaborations.

 

"The mastery of all aspects of computing is inherently interdisciplinary work" says Philippe Baptiste, director of the Institute of Information Science and interactions of CNRS. "With a community of about 2,500 researchers involved in this activity, the CNRS is one of the major players on the international level and is based on the calculation for advancing research in many fields."

 

"We are proud to bring the best French researchers of IBM technology and solutions to support the future challenges that are, in all fields of research and innovation both in France and in Europe," said Alain Benichou, president of IBM France.

 

IBM, with 3000 researchers and $6 billion of annual investment in research in this area is unique. The expertise of French researchers from CNRS and skills associated with their peers from IBM, including those of experts based on the IBM site in Montpellier, will make better use of these supercomputing resources.

 

After a series of Grand Challenges are completed at the end of 2012, Turing and Ada supercomputers will be at the service of all French researchers in January 2013.