Atos and the CEA place Tera 1000 in World’s Top 15
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.
