European plans for a supercomputer are taking shape. Eviden, an Atos subsidiary, will start work on it from the beginning of 2024.
The contract was awarded by the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), which will also cover half the cost to turn the project into a reality. It is an impressive result for the relatively new Eviden, which was launched by Atos as a subsidiary. According to EuroHPC, the project will cost 273 million, although Eviden itself cites 500 million as the total price including five years of operating costs.
Tip: Atos wants to rid itself of legacy and debt
The exascale system is called Jupiter and will consist of two components. One of them is a scalable GPU cluster, the other a module meant for general computation that is based on the European chip known as SiPearl Rhea. In addition to Eviden, Germany’s ParTec is also participating in the project.
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The supercomputer will be built at the Supercomputing Center in Jülich, situated between Aachen and Düsseldorf. It will cover an area of four tennis courts and feature 260 kilometers of interconnects. Both scientific purposes and commercial ones are welcome, such as training large foundation models for generative AI, developing advanced materials and creating digital twins of the heart and brain, for example.
The bandwidth spec is staggering: Eviden promises 2,000 Tb per second, “the equivalent of 11,800 full copies of Wikipedia every second,” according to the company.
In terms of GPUs, we can expect “next-generation” variants of Nvidia’s data center offerings. More details will be given at the annual SC23 conference focused on supercomputing in November in Denver, Colorado.
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