GENCI and CNRS choose Eviden to make the Jean Zay supercomputer one of the most powerful in France - Seite 2

This new evolution is in line with the announcement made by French President Emmanuel Macron on 14 June at the Vivatech 2023 conference, to support the development of sovereign artificial intelligence, in particular generative AI. To this end, GENCI has been awarded €40m. This exceptional grant also includes an additional €10m to strengthen and extend the human resources of the French National Artificial Intelligence Research Programme (PNRIA) and to support AI communities. The goal is to guarantee the long-term quality of the service provided by the CNRS network of AI support engineers, which helps AI communities to carry out their projects at Jean Zay.

This new availability of computing resources available to scientific communities will help to boost the capabilities of the French AI sector in the face of international competition.

Configuration
In total after this extension, Jean Zay will be equipped with 1,456 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, in addition to the 416 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and 1,832 NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs remaining from the old configuration. Jean Zay's increased power will be provided by 14 Eviden BullSequana XH3000 compute racks featuring 364 dual-processor Intel Sapphire Rapids 48-core servers, 512 GB of memory and four NVIDIA H100 80GB SXM5 GPUs, each interconnected by four high-speed NVIDIA ConnectX-7 400Gb/s InfiniBand network adapters.

The storage environment will be completely overhauled, offering a first level of 4.3 PB of flash technology (read/write speeds of over 1 TB/s) and a second level of 39 PB of fast disk technology (read/write speeds of over 300 GB/s), both under Lustre and supplied by DDN.

Eviden BullSequana extension to Jean Zay supercomputer

Quotes

Bruno Le Maire, French Minister for the Economy, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty
“France's position as a world leader in artificial intelligence will depend in particular on its access to the public and private computing power needed to develop competitive models. The extension of the Jean Zay supercomputer is the first step in the deployment of a global strategy aimed at developing computing power in France that is accessible to researchers, start-ups and digital companies, in support of the development of our AI ecosystem under sovereign conditions.”