Cray Storage Systems Integrated by Atos in Joliot-Curie HPC

Cray, Inc. announced that GENCI‘s newest nine petaflops supercomputer, Joliot-Curie, a BullSequana X1000 system from Atos, integrates its ClusterStor storage systems.

This year, GENCI announced the upcoming operational launch of Joliot-Curie, its new Atos supercomputer honoring the renowned Nobel Prize-winning French couple, Dr. Irène and Dr.Frédéric Joliot-Curie.

This nine petaflops system is based on a balanced architecture, made up of a BullSequana X1000 system from Atos, which includes Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Xeon Phi processors, empowered with the Cray ClusterStor storage system. The system delivers 300GB/s sustained throughput from 5PB usable capacity through the Lustre file system in a footprint of just three racks.

The new Joliot-Curie system is operated by CEA in its TGCC facility. It will be used for both PRACE and national scientific and national needs.

“At GENCI we believe that supercomputers will be at the very heart of accelerated scientific discovery process enabled by the convergence of HPC simulation/modelling with high-performance data analytics/big data and artificial intelligence,” said Philippe Lavocat, CEO, GENCI. “This convergence creates order of magnitude increases in input and output data in increasingly heterogeneous scientific workflows.“

He continued: “With the Cray ClusterStor storage platform, we can cope with this data growth without the need to spend more and more on HPC storage at the expense of the ‘Computing’ in HPC. This allows us to be able to deliver balanced supercomputers to the French and European scientific communities, within a reasonable and controlled budget.“

“We are honored Cray ClusterStor was chosen to provide the storage platform for the new Joliot-Curie supercomputer,” said Pascal Barbolosi, VP, EMEA sales, Cray. “The convergence of HPC and artificial intelligence creates data-intensive workloads that are unprecedented. This is why Cray continues to invest in innovative storage solutions worldwide.“

“It is critical for CEA to work with partners that understand the unique challenges of building solutions at the leading edge of supercomputing,” said Jacques-Charles Lafoucrière, department lead, CEA. “Cray ClusterStor excels in performance efficiency and, over the past few years, the ClusterStor platform has proven its stability in the most demanding HPC environments at CEA. Key environmental factors such as density and power requirements also weighed in favor of the ClusterStor solution.“

Cray ClusterStor L300N
The system with NXD flash accelerating software optimizes multiple mixed workloads on the same storage platform, eliminating data access bottlenecks through flash-based small file acceleration. Organizations will be able to automatically support multiple applications that require a diverse range of storage access patterns, such as small block and large block, without making any changes to applications or processes. ClusterStor NXD scales performance linearly with the size of the system.