French Meteorological Center will use new Atos supercomputers

Atos, the global leader in digital transformation, has signed a new four-year contract with the French national meteorological service Météo-France for the supply of two supercomputers based on BullSequana XH2000, the latest manufacturer technology. The new systems will enhance the computing power of Météo-France by five or more times compared to the solutions that are used now, which will allow achieving a number of scientific breakthroughs in weather forecasting. Each of the new supercomputers is capable of more than 10 million operations per second and is one of the most productive meteorological machines in the world.

The increase in computing power will enable Météo-France to provide customers with improved, more accurate and reliable forecasts. The company will be able to, with great success and at earlier stages, identify unexpected local weather anomalies that greatly affect people's daily lives (for example, showers, strong wind gusts, the chance of hail) and warn about them in advance, as well as improve their research on changes climate.

A contract of 42 million euros was concluded between Atos and Météo-France after negotiations with other major representatives of the HPC market. This is the first time that Météo-France has renewed its contract with a supplier of supercomputers. BullSequana XH2000 technology stands out for its high energy efficiency thanks to the patented DLC (Direct Liquid Cooling) solution – it uses warm water heated to 40 degrees Celsius, which reduces overall energy consumption.

“We are very pleased to be able to work again with Météo-France and enhance their computing power with our supercomputers with BullSequana XH2000 technology,” said Pierre Barnabe, Head of Big Data and Security and Atos Vice President. “The BullSequana XH2000 architecture is powered by the latest generation of processors and generators and can offer Météo-France a total peak performance of twenty petaflops to achieve even higher accuracy in the results.” In addition, the system is energy efficient and reduces electricity consumption. ”

The first BullSequana XH2000 supercomputer will be installed at the Météo-France National Computing Center in Toulouse starting in November; by January 2020, it will be ready for regular checks on the functionality of the service. Installation of a second supercomputer at the Toulouse Research Institute will begin in May next year and will reach the testing phase by July. In the second half of 2020, these two machines will already be used for compiling operational weather forecasts, as well as for studying the atmosphere, ocean and climate. AMD’s latest-generation EPYC x86 processors are integrated on both BullSequana XH2000 platforms.

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