Atos will build and install a new high-performance computer for the Max Planck Society, a world-leading science and technology research organisation. The new system will be based on Atos’s latest BullSequana XH3000 platform, powered by AMD EPYC CPUs and Instinct accelerators. In its final configuration, the application performance will be three times higher than the current “Cobra” system, which is also based on Atos technologies.
The new supercomputer, costing over 20m Euro, will be operated by the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility (MPCDF) in Garching near Munich and will provide high-performance computing (HPC) capacity for many institutes of the Max Planck Society. Particularly demanding scientific projects, such as those in astrophysics, life science research, materials research, plasma physics, and AI will benefit from the high-performance capabilities of the new system.
“The computing power required by scientific research is ever increasing and we see an unabated need for high-performance computing capacity. We want to provide the best possible support to our researchers in their work and have therefore decided to modernize our high-performance computing complex. With Atos and AMD, we have the right partners for this. The new solution will certainly meet our demands and once again advance science in leaps and bounds,” said Prof. Erwin Laure, Director of the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility.
The system will run without fans thanks to its unmatched hot water cooling (Direct Liquid Cooling) and thus have a significantly improved energy efficiency. The efficiency gained from this Atos’ cooling system matched with the latest in silicon architecture innovations from AMD, designed with energy efficiency in mind, brings the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) value to less than 1.05 (1 being the ideal ratio), far below the average of other HPC installations.
The installation will feature 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors and for the first time in an Atos-based European system, the upcoming AMD Instinct MI300A accelerator. The system will consist of ten BullSequana XH3000 racks with a total of 768 processor nodes of and 192 accelerator nodes and will be complemented with an IBM SpectrumScale storage solution. The CPU nodes will be delivered in the third quarter of 2023, with full installation of the GPU nodes expected in the first half of 2024.
