The Alice Recoque supercomputer will be the second European system reaching more than one billion billion calculations per second. This next-generation supercomputer represents a significant technological milestone for Europe. It will address European major societal and scientific challenges via the convergence at scale of numerical simulation, massive data analysis and artificial intelligence (AI).
This new system will in particular improve the development of high-precision models to mitigate the effects of climate change, foster innovation in new materials and energy sources, support the creation of digital twins of the human body for personalised medicine and underpin the training of next generation of European generative AI, multimodal and foundation models. Alice Recoque will also address the challenges raised by the vast amounts of data generated by scientific instruments such as telescopes, satellites, as well as IoT devices and AI applications. Thanks to its unprecedented computing power, this system will be a cornerstone to processing, inferring and leveraging data at incredibly high speeds with maximum energy efficiency.
This newest EuroHPC supercomputer is named after Alice Recoque, a French computer scientist and AI pioneer. Born in 1929 in Algeria, Alice Recoque graduated from the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielle (ESPCI) in 1954.Having specialised in computing architectures, including massively parallel computers, she later worked on the design of the first mini computers. In the 1980s, she became the Strategic Leader in AI for the Bull group and was one of the first French scientists within the AI research domain.
The Alice Recoque supercomputer will be hosted and operated by the Jules Verne consortium, led by France through GENCI and CEA, with the participation of the Netherlands through SURF. GENCI, as Hosting Entity, will manage this new supercomputer, which will be located and operated at CEA’s supercomputing center TGCC (Très Grand Centre de calcul du CEA) in Bruyères-le-Châtel as Hosting Site.
This system will be available to serve a wide range of European researchers from academia and industry as well as public services. Access to the computing resources of the new machine will be jointly managed by the EuroHPC JU and the Jules Verne consortium in proportion to their investments.
With a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of more than EUR 544 million, the project will be co-funded by the EuroHPC JU, with budget stemming from the Digital Europe Programme (DEP) and by contributions from France and the Netherlands. The JU will co-fund up to 50% of the total cost of the supercomputer.
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Alice Recoque will be based on a modular and energy-efficient architecture providing several compute, pre/post processing and service partitions federated by a high-speed internal interconnect, sharing access to a tiered data-centric storage architecture, and managed by a unified system administration and resource management stack. Taking benefit of on-going French and European initiatives, it will also incorporate experimental hybrid quantum computing partitions and will be open to integrate additional new EU-based sovereign technologies, paving the path to post exascale architectures and services.
The hosting agreement, which has now been signed, is a contractual document that defines the roles, rights and obligations of each party. The procurement process for this new supercomputer will be managed by EuroHPC JU and will begin in the immediate future.
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Background
EuroHPC Joint Undertaking
The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) is a legal and funding entity created in 2018 to enable the European Union and EuroHPC participating countries to coordinate their efforts and pool their resources with the objective of making Europe a world leader in supercomputing.
The mission of the EuroHPC JU is:
- to develop, deploy, extend and maintain in the EU a federated, secure hyperconnected supercomputing, quantum computing, service and data infrastructure ecosystem;
- to support the development and uptake of demand-oriented and user-driven innovative and competitive supercomputing and quantum computing systems based on a supply chain that will ensure the availability of components, technologies and knowledge;
- and, to widen the use of that supercomputing and quantum computing infrastructure to a large number of public and private users.
In order to equip Europe with a world-leading supercomputing infrastructure, the EuroHPC JU has already procured nine supercomputers, located across Europe. This includes JUPITER, the first European exascale system, currently under deployment in Germany and whose first module named JEDI is ranked first place in the Green500 list of the most energy-efficient supercomputers worldwide.
No matter where in Europe they are located, European scientists and users from the public sector and industry can benefit from these EuroHPC supercomputers via the EuroHPC Access Calls to advance science and support the development of a wide range of applications with industrial, scientific and societal relevance for Europe.
GENCI
Created by the public authorities in 2007, GENCI (Grand Équipement National de Calcul Intensif) is a major research infrastructure. This public operator aims to democratise the use of digital simulation through high performance computing associated with the use of artificial intelligence, and quantum computing to support French scientific and industrial competitiveness.
GENCI is in charge of three missions:
- To implement the national strategy for the provision of high-performance computing resources, storage, massive data processing associated with Artificial Intelligence technologies and quantum computing, for the benefit of French scientific research, in conjunction with the 3 national computing centres (CEA/TGCC, CNRS/IDRIS, France Universités/CINES).
- Supporting the creation of an integrated ecosystem on a national and European level
- Promoting digital simulation and supercomputing to academic research and industry
GENCI is a civil company 49% owned by the State represented by the Ministry in charge of Higher Education and Research, 20% by the CEA, 20% by the CNRS, 10% by the Universities represented by France Universités and 1% by Inria.
CEA
The CEA is a major research organisation working in the best interests of the French State, its economy and citizens. Thanks to its strong roots in fundamental research, it is able to provide tangible solutions to meet their needs in four key fields: low-carbon energy, digital technologies, technologies for medicine of the future, defence and national security.
As the world's leading innovator among public research organisations (Clarivate 2024), the CEA acts as a catalyst and accelerator of innovation for French industry. It helps businesses in all sectors be more competitive, creating high-performance products that stand out from the crowd and developing trail-blazing solutions that lead to changes in society. The CEA deploys this dynamic in all regions of France aiding local partners to innovate themselves, thus helping to create sustainable value and jobs nationwide, tailored to meet actual industry needs. At the same time, it supports the development of its 250 start-ups, agile vectors for transferring the disruptive technology and knowledge developed at CEA laboratories to industry.
SURF
SURF is the cooperative association in which Dutch research universities, universities of applied sciences, vocational schools, university medical centers, and research institutions work together to provide the best IT for education and research. We develop and provide reliable, state-of-the-art IT services, or purchase them centrally on favorable conditions. We collaborate on new, innovative applications of IT in education and research. And we come together to exchange knowledge, ideas and expertise on IT, but also on social issues that touch on IT, such as the digital transition, public values, privacy, data sharing and lifelong development. We incorporate new insights into our services and innovations. This keeps Dutch education and research at the top of the world.
Details
- Publication date
- 21 June 2024
- Author
- European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking