CEA acquires BullSequana supercomputer from Atos equipped with Marvell ThunderX2 Arm-based processors

Paris, Bruyères-le-Châtel, November 8 2018 - Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, announces it will provide its BullSequana X1310, Atos' first Arm-based supercomputer, to the CEA (French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission)'s Military Applications Division (CEA/DAM). The machine will include the new Marvell ThunderX2 64-bit processors.

CEA has been developing large, multi-physics, mission critical codes for over 40 years. This is particularly the case of CEA's Military Applications Division (CEA/DAM) since the end of the French nuclear tests 22 years ago. The validation of those codes is an important part of the work of developers and CEA's teams have observed that running these codes on different platforms from different architectures and using a variety of compilers and libraries from different sources helps find bugs and deviations from standards. Therefore, in order to provide the best validation environment at scale to its code developers, CEA/DAM ordered an Arm-based BullSequana cluster from Atos, using the new ThunderX2 CPU from Marvell.

Developed by Atos, this system is part of the Mont-Blanc 3 project, funded by the European Commission, which aims to assess the potential of Arm-based clusters to address exascale HPC needs, develop the corresponding software ecosystem and issue recommendations for an exascale ARM-based system.

The new model, which will be delivered at the end of 2018 in the Île-de-France CEA/DAM center, located at Bruyères-le-Châtel, includes a BullSequana rack with 92 BullSequana X1310 blades, three compute nodes per blade, dual Marvell ThunderX2 processors of 32 cores @ 2.2 GHz, based on the Armv8-A instruction set, with 256 GB per node and Infiniband EDR interconnect. The new ThunderX2 processor supports up to four threads per core with 8 memory channels delivering the combination of compute and memory bandwidth required for critical scientific workloads. The ThunderX2 family is fully compliant with Armv8-A architecture specifications as well as the Arm Server Base System Architecture (SBSA) and Arm Server Base Boot Requirements (SBBR) standards. ThunderX2 further accelerates adoption for Arm servers in the most demanding HPC deployments by providing the next level of computing performance and ecosystem readiness for commercial deployments.