The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and Eviden have delivered a new EXA1 HE (High Efficiency) supercomputer.

Based on Atos-owned Eviden’s BullSequana XH3000 technology, the system has been designed to meet the needs of the simulation program run by the Military Applications Division of the CEA, a publicly funded body that conducts R&D across a wide range of technology areas.

The supercomputer contains 477 Nvidia Grace Hopper Superchips, is cooled by a warm-water cooling system, and has an interconnect system based on the latest version of Eviden’s BullSequana eXascale Interconnect system. Its network is composed of 156 switches and relies on a DragonFly topology.

The system has a peak performance of 104 petaflops and can achieve a Linpack performance of about 60 petaflops.

Eviden previously delivered an EXA1 HF (High Frequency) supercomputer to the CEA in 2021, with the new EXA1 HE system representing the second half of the EAX1 program.

“We are pleased to see the full deployment of this new system,” said Jacques-Charles Lafoucriere, program director at CEA’s Military Applications Directorate. “With the first applications having already been run on it through best-in-class accelerated technologies that have also been chosen for exascale systems, CEA’s Military Applications Division will be able to meet its HPC and AI needs for the future challenges of its simulation program.”

In March 2024, Eviden was selected to upgrade the capacity of the Jean Zay supercomputer at the National Center for Scientific Research, supplying 1,456 Nvidia H100 GPUs to increase the peak computing power from 36.85 petaflops to 125.9 petaflops.

In April, Eviden was chosen to extend the compute capacity of the Santos Dumont supercomputer housed at the National Laboratory for Scientific Computing in Brazil.