European fabless semiconductor company, SiPearl, has delivered the first samples of its Rhea1 CPU to Bull for integration into Europe’s first exascale supercomputer. As advanced computing and AI solutions provider, Bull will integrate Rhea1 in its BullSequana XH3000 platform for JUPITER, making it the first European-designed CPU deployed in a European-built platform.
“The delivery of the first Rhea1 CPUs marks an important milestone for Europe’s supercomputing sovereignty. Through the European Processor Initiative, EuroHPC JU has supported the development of a European processor that is now moving from innovation to deployment in JUPITER, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer. This achievement demonstrates what Europe can accomplish by bringing together research, industry and world-class infrastructure to build a stronger European HPC ecosystem,” said Anders Dam Jensen, Executive Director of EuroHPC JU.
Rhea1 includes in a single package 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores – each with 2 x 256-bit Scalable Vector Extension, 4 stacks of HBM and 4 DDR5 interfaces. This makes Rhea1 well suited to the most demanding HPC workloads whilst offering back-door free and kill switch free security, energy-efficiency and flexibility.
“Rhea1 plays an important role in JUPITER’s Cluster Module, complementing the GPU-based Booster with a CPU-based architecture designed for a broad range of complex and data-intensive workloads. Its high memory bandwidth is particularly well suited to applications that benefit from efficient access to large amounts of data. Bringing this European processor technology into JUPITER is an important step in making these capabilities available to the scientific community,” noted Prof. Dr. Thomas Lippert, Director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre at Forschungszentrum Jülich.
Procured by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, JUPITER is hosted at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. This milestone will contribute to the development of JUPITER’s CPU blade, complementary to the GPU partition, paving the way for the full modular integration of the machine. From dramatically improving extreme weather forecasts to accelerating breakthroughs in climate science, sustainable energy, AI, quantum research, and structural biology, this supercomputer promises to empower researchers, industries, public organizations across Europe to drive innovation at an unprecedented scale.
Rhea1 will also feature in the OpenCUBE collaborative project (Horizon Europe), which aims to provide a ready-to-deploy cloud platform using European processors built on an entirely open-source software stack. The project received the first unit of SiPearl’s Rhea1-dedicated reference design server, the Seine Server, to HPE’s lab in Grenoble.
“The delivery of a first unit of our Seine Server to the OpenCUBE collaborative project marks a significant milestone for Europe’s digital sovereignty. Indeed, there can be no sovereign cloud – that is, one that guarantees the integrity and security of the strategic data stored and processed within it – without European processors. The turnkey, replicable platform developed thanks to the involvement of all OpenCUBE partners represents a decisive step that will help raise public awareness of this reality,” said Philippe Notton, CEO and founder of SiPearl.
Previously, SiPearl had successfully carried out tests in its laboratories on the Seine Reference Server, which focused, in particular, on the integration of HPE Slingshot, HPE’s Ethernet network technology for data-intensive High Performance Computing (HPC) and AI workloads. These tests will now be carried out on the Seine Server installed within the OpenCUBE pilot system, paving the way for provisioning a cloud platform blueprint based on European technologies, which can be deployed reproducibly.
Combining high-performance with energy-efficiency, the OpenCUBE ready-to-deploy platform will provide a solid foundation for European cloud services, research, and commercial deployments envisioned to be core for federated sovereign digital services.
OpenCUBE partners include KTH Royal Institute of Technology, European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), HPE, Spanish fabless semiconductor company Semidynamics, SiPearl and Technische Universität München (TUM).
“European processors are an important step towards reducing technological dependencies, but their value can only be realized through an integrated hardware and software stack. HPE has a strong interest in expanding the technology choices available to our customers, which is why we are working with the OpenCUBE partners to create an open, secure and deployment-ready platform for demanding cloud and HPC environments, said Andrew Wheeler, Deputy CTO, SVP and Director of HPE Labs.
