From Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique via EurekAlert, May 14:
Jean Zay supercomputer: France has increased its AI dedicated resources fourfold
- The fourth extension of the Jean Zay supercomputer has increased its computing power by 4, making it one of the most powerful, and the most used, supercomputers in France and Europe in the field of artificial intelligence.
- These new capacities will be made available for strategic scientific and industrial applications.
- Countless research and innovation fields will be able to take advantage of this expanded power free of charge for open research, including biomedical research, astronomical data analysis, self-driving, new material design, new energy, agriculture, decision support, and culture, among others.
The Jean Zay supercomputer was put into service in 2019. It replaced its predecessor Turing, whose computing power it increased tenfold. To meet the growing needs of the artificial intelligence community, it subsequently integrated successive extensions that improved its performance and functionalities. The fourth of these was announced in June 2023 by French President Emmanuel Macron during the VivaTech trade show.
Acquired by GENCI from the European manufacturer Eviden after a competitive dialogue procedure, Jean Zay 4 now has 125.9 petaflops of 64-bit computing power, corresponding to 125.9 million billion operations per second. If all of humanity counted at the rate of one operation per second, it would take 182 days to calculate what the Jean Zay supercomputer can do in one second. The supercomputer’s storage capacity also increased, reaching the order of 100 petabytes.
Thousands of research projects have already used Jean Zay for free, hence the importance of Jean Zay 4’s resources for academic research teams, start-ups, and large companies. Some projects are highly emblematic, and enjoy international renown. To illustrate this enthusiasm, three scientific projects were presented during the inauguration:....
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GENCI had some of the details of the upgrade in this November 2024 announcement.
They seem to think there may be something to this AI stuff.
