NVIDIA’s new Ampere architecture is already making waves across the pond. It was only a few days ago that NVIDIA officially revealed its new data center GPU, the A100, during GTC 2020. At the time, a number of entities also rallied behind the launch with future plans of integration. Well, now Atos is one of the first to formally announce the integration of the A100. Atos will be adding the A100 to the JUWELS BullSequana X2415 supercomputer. This crowning achievement will make it the first supercomputer in Europe to do so.
“Forschungszentrum Jülich will integrate this new blade into its booster module, extending its existing JUWELS BullSequana supercomputer, making it the first system worldwide the use this new technology. The JUWELS Booster will provide researchers across Europe with significantly increased computational resources. Some of the projects it will fuel are the European Commission’s Human Brain Project and the Jülich Laboratories of “Climate Science” and “Molecular Systems”. Once fully deployed this summer the upgraded supercomputing system, operated under ParTec’s software ParaStation Modulo, is expected to provide a computational peak performance of more than 70 Petaflops/s making it the most powerful supercomputer in Europe and a showcase for European exascale architecture.”
Integration will be facilitated via the NVIDIA HGX-A100 baseboard. Four of the NVIDIA A100 GPUs will be installed on the baseboard. In turn, they will be connected by NVIDIA NVLink® interconnect technology Cooling these immensely powerful HPCs will be done by Atos’s patented DLC or Direct Liquid Cooling, which uses warm water for cooling.
Atos was in the news earlier in the year for the inclusion of another well-known data center favorite. Its BullSequana XH2000 weather-predicting supercomputer featured AMD EPYC 7742 processors. The BullSequana X2415 continues this trend as well. NVIDIA’s $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox will also begin to see a return on investment. Up to four NVIDIA Mellanox InfiniBand ports will be used in a Dragonfly+ configuration. Atos is planning on having the BullSequana X2415 available in Q2 2020.