This result crowns the expertise acquired by the CEA/DAM and Atos in High-Performance Computing (HPC)

Atos, an international leader in digital transformation, and the CEA (French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission)’s direction of defense applications (CEA/DAM) place Tera 1000 – a supercomputer they developed together for defense and nuclear deterrence uses – among the world’s 500 most powerful machines.

Reaching the 14th position, Tera 1000 thus becomes the most powerful European general-purpose supercomputer, with a computing power of 25 petaflops and a very competitive power consumption of 4 MegaWatts.

This result crowns the expertise acquired by the CEA/DAM and Atos in High-Performance Computing (HPC), and the co-design strategy initiated some 18 years ago by the two partners, working together as top contenders in the international competition towards exascale capacities – reaching a billion calculations per second.

Developing an exaflop-class supercomputer by 2020 is a necessity for some of the defense programs implemented by the CEA/DAM. To reach this capacity, technological breakthroughs are needed – most notably, to maintain low levels of energy consumption, one of the key challenges in the high-performance computing market, but also to ensure smooth information flows and process the significant volumes of data produced by increasingly precise simulations of multi-physical, multi-dimensional phenomena.

To do so, the CEA/DAM decided to adopt co-design processes developed by Atos, with the help of Intel. The objective is to maximize the performances of the supercomputer by testing it on applications. The CEA/DAM’s competencies are required at several levels: for the structure of the applications’ computing codes, the interaction between these codes and the supercomputer and for the architecture of the supercomputer itself.