The BullSequana supercomputer will help to estimate codes to developers of department on defense developments in France

On November 14, 2018 the Atos company announced delivery of BullSequana X1310, the Atos supercomputer based on architecture of ARM, to department on defense developments (CEA/DAM) of the Commissariat on atomic and to alternative energy types (CEA).

CEA is engaged in development of large-scale, multiphysical, crucial codes for more than 40 years. In particular, in this direction the department on defense developments of CEA works from the moment of completion of nuclear weapons tests by France. Assessment of these codes is an important part of work of developers, and specialists of CEA noted that start of these codes on different platforms based on different architecture and use of different compilers and libraries from various sources helps to find errors in work and possible deviations from the set standards. So that to provide to the developers of the code the best environment for assessment, CEA/DAM ordered from Atos company BullSequana cluster based on architecture of Arm. In this supercomputer ThunderX2 processors of Marvell company will be used.

The system developed by Atos company is a part of the Mont-Blanc 3 project which is financed by the Commission of the European Union. He is called to estimate possibilities of use of clusters based on architecture of Arm in the field of eksaflopsny calculations. Besides, within this initiative development of the corresponding program ecosystem and preparation of recommendations for developers of the eksaflopsny systems based on this architecture is performed.

A system which at the end of 2018 will be installed in the CEA/DAM center in the region Ile-de-France in the commune of Bruyer-le-Shatel includes a server rack of BullSequana about the 92nd blade modules of BullSequana X1310 (three computing nodes on one blade module) with double 32 nuclear Marvell ThunderX2 processors with a frequency of 2.2 GHz. Besides, in development the command set of Armv8-A, 256 GB of memory on one node and technology of interconnections Infiniband EDR is used. ThunderX2 processors support to four computing flows on one core, and eight channels of memory provide sufficient capacity for processing of crucial scientific workloads. ThunderX2 processor family completely meets specifications of architecture Armv8-A and also the Arm Server Base System Architecture (SBSA) and Arm Server Base Boot Requirements (SBBR) standards. ThunderX2 processors accelerate implementation of Arm-servers in resource-intensive projects based on high-performance computing, providing the high performance and readiness of an ecosystem for commercial projects.

For November, 2018 CEA/DAM already received the first set a blade modules to start work on porting and optimization of the software. The first results showed that the created cluster represents perspective architecture for processing of the tasks requiring large volumes of memory.

"This project represents the culmination of our participation in the Mont-Blanc project which is engaged in assessment of potential of use of clusters based on architecture of Arm in the field of eksaflopsny calculations. The BullSequana X1310 system represents the commercial version of the prototype developed and created by Atos within the Mont-Blanc project". Sophie Proust Houssiaux, head of Big Data and security of Atos company