Date:01/07/19

Atos to deliver most powerful supercomputer in Norway to national e-infrastructure provider Uninett Sigma2

Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, has signed a 4-year contract to deliver its latest supercomputer, the BullSequana XH2000, to Uninett Sigma2, the national e-infrastructure provider in Norway. The supercomputer will be Norway’s most powerful supercomputer and provide Norwegian researchers with an enhanced computing capacity to enable new innovation breakthroughs.
 
Modern research requires significant computing power and generates large amounts of data. Therefore, businesses need to optimize the efficiency of their application workflows as well as energy consumption, whilst minimizing TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). With the BullSequana XH2000 system, which is equipped with next-generation AMD EPYC™ processors, Atos is providing a supercomputer which will give Norwegian researchers more than 5  times more capacity than previously, with a theoretical peak performance of 5.9  PetaFlops. Together this will enable scientists a powerful new tool for research initiatives ranging from modeling climate change and discovering new cancer drugs to gaining a better understanding of the origins of the universe.
 
“This new solution provides Uninett Sigma2 with a powerful environment for data-intensive computing. It is of the utmost importance for Norwegian researchers to have access to e-infrastructure at a high international level in order to be competitive, and a continuing growing number of research groups will benefit greatly from the computational power of the new system. This system will help us catch up some of the current lack of resources, but significant increase in funding is necessary to remedy the lack of resources.  said Gunnar Bøe, Managing Director of Uninett Sigma2.
 
“Our new BullSequana XH2000 includes the latest processor and accelerator architectures to provide more computing power to support users go beyond the limits of traditional simulation. As the leading European supercomputer manufacturer, we are proud to be contributing to the competitiveness of Norway and the Norwegian research and academic community.” said Pierre Barnabé, Senior Executive Vice-President, Head of Big Data & CyberSecurity Division at Atos.
 
Environmentally friendly
 
One significant and important aspect of this supercomputer installation is energy recovery. Firstly, it is 100% water-cooled using Atos’ patented DLC (Direct Liquid Cooling) solution, which minimizes global energy consumption by using warm water. Secondly, all the electricity used for this new system will come from hydro-electric power plants. Additionally, the new machine will be able to recover most of the energy used for calculation and cooling, using hot water to heat the buildings at the university campus at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science & Technology).
 
Technical specifications:
 
- The system comprises of 1344 compute nodes each equipped with 2 x 64core, next-generation AMD EPYC™ processors, code name ‘Rome’, for a total of 172032 cores installed on a total footprint of only 14.78m2. The total compute power will be close to 6Pflops.
- The system will consume 952kW of power and 95% of the heat will be captured to water.
- The computes nodes will be interconnected with the new generation of Mellanox HDR technology.
- The data management solution will rely on a DDN storage with a Lustre parallel file system of more than 2.5PB.

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