France to Deploy AI-Focused Supercomputer: Jean Zay

HPE announced today that it won the contract to build a supercomputer that will drive France's AI and HPC efforts. The computer will be part of GENCI, the French national infrastructure for HPC resources and facilities. The system, named Jean Zay after the French politician and cultural figure, came at the behest of an action issued by President of France Emmanuel Macron in support of the national strategy to make France the European leader in artificial intelligence research. Financed by GENCI and based on the HPE SGI 8600 platform, Jean Zay is slated to deliver a peak performance of 14 petaflops. Under a unified Omni-Path Architecture network, the system encompasses 1,528 Intel next-generation Xeon nodes and 261 GPU nodes, each with four Nvidia Tesla V100 (32GB) GPUs, 1,044 in all.