SC19: Meteo France Selects Mellanox HDR IB

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced that its HDR IB has been selected by Météo France to accelerate two new HPCs, based on Atos’s BullSequana XH2000 technology.

HDR IB ConnectX-6 adapters, Mellanox Quantum switches and LinkX cables and transceivers will interconnect nearly 5000 Atos BullSequana server blades and NetApp, Inc.‘s storage platforms, delivering high throughput and low latency connectivity.

Météo France is the French national meteorological service, providing weather forecasting services for many companies including transport, agriculture, energy and others, as well as to a large number of media channels and world-wide sporting and cultural events.

“We have been using IB for many years to connect our supercomputing platforms in the most efficient and scalable way, enabling us to conduct high performance weather research and forecasting simulations,” said Alain Beuraud, HPC project manager, Météo France. “We are excited to leverage the HDR IB technology advantages, its In-Network Computing acceleration engines, extremely low latency, and advanced routing capabilities to empower our next supercomputing platforms. We look forward to continuing work with Mellanox, and to delivering leading weather services to our customers in France and worldwide.”

“The performance advantages of HDR IB and the standard guarantee of backward- and forward-compatibility ensure leading performance and scalability for compute and data intensive applications, and enable our users to protect their data center investments,” said Gilad Shainer, SVP marketing, Mellanox. “We are proud to collaborate with Atos and Météo France to build the new supercomputing platforms.“

The two new HPCs will offer a 5.6 times compute power speedup, compared to Météo France’s existing platforms. The BullSequana XH2000 is an energy-efficient platform utilizing its patented water-cooled DLC (Direct Liquid Cooling) solution, which minimizes global energy consumption by using warm water up to 40°C.