GENCI has upgraded its France-based Adastra supercomputer with AMD's latest APUs.
Hosted and operated by CINES in Montpellier, Adastra integrated 112 AMD Instinct MI300A Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) in October 2023.
The APUs sit in a new HPE Cray EX4000 cabinet which has 14 HPE Cray EX255a Accelerator Blades, and 28 nodes each with 4 AMD Instinct MI300A APUs. Each APU is connected to one HPE Slingshot interconnect 11 NIC 200 Gbps.
The AMD Instinct M1300A APU was launched in January 2023 and blends a total of 13 chiplets, of which many are 3D stacked, creating a single chip package with 24 Zen 4 CPU cores fused with a CDNA 3 graphics engine and eight stacks of HBM3 memory totaling 128GB.
Adastra was ranked 17th on the latest Top500 list, and third on the Green500. The high-performance computing (HPC) system also features AMD Optimized 3rd Generation Epyc CPUs. As of the November ranking, the system had a peak performance of 46.1 petaflops and 319,072 cores.
Plans for Adastra were first shared in November 2021. The HPC system is used for research in many domains including climate research, astrophysics, material sciences and chemistry, new energies including fusion, and biology and health applications.
The upgrade has contributed to research by LAERO (Laboratoire d'Aerologie) for an atmospheric non-hydrostatic model which was used to study storms in the Atlantic and Mediterranean.
GENCI is the French national agency for HPC and was created by public authorities in 2007. In June 2023 it was announced that GENCI would be managing Europe's second exascale supercomputer which will be installed outside of Paris in 2025. In total, the organization operates 130 petaflops of compute capacity.
