GENCI, the French national HPC agency, is set to retire its Joliot-Curie supercomputer once its Alice Recoque exascale machine comes online, DCD can exclusively report.

According to the tender documents for the upcoming Alice Recoque system, the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) states that GENCI will couple “two experimental hybrid quantum computing partitions” with Alice Recoque, “replacing Joliot-Curie… thereby enabling a hybrid HPC/QC service for European communities and facilitating new applications.”

According to the tender document, the hybrid quantum computer partitions have resulted from the HPCQS (High-Performance Computer and Quantum Simulator) and EuroQCS-France European projects.

The Joliot-Curie supercomputer is a 22 petaflops Eviden BullSequana system, owned by GENCI and installed at the TGCC computing center in 2019.

TGCC (Travaux Généraux de Construction de Casablanca) is one of the three national computing centers in France operated by CEA, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission.

It’s unclear how many qubits will be made available to the Alice Recoque system however, in February 2024, it was reported that the EuroQCS-France project would offer at least ten physical qubits when coupled with the Joliot-Curie supercomputer.

At the time of that announcement, the EuroHPC JU said the system would support the exploration of multiple hybrid HPC-Quantum Computing workloads and be used for research projects including electromagnetic simulation, structural mechanics, engine combustion, material simulation, meteorology, and earth observation.

According to the EuroHPC JU’s provisional schedule for the Alice Recoque supercomputer, installation of the machine is slated for Q1 2026, with its main partition due to be operational in Q4 of that same year.

DCD has approached EuroHPC JU, GENCI, CEA, and Atos for comment.