Key characteristics
The supercomputer, which was installed at Centrale Nantes at the end of 2015 as part of the Connect Talent project in the Pays de la Loire region, is one of the most powerful in its category in France (Tier-2). Giving access to unprecedented levels of precision, this state-of-the-art equipment is a real game changer which will release new potential for innovation:
- 11th fastest french Tier-2 computer in academic and research segments.
- +280 TFlop/s System Based on X86 architecture running 6 384 cores.
Equipment
- 266 bi-socket nodes Intel Xeon E5-2860v3 2.5GHz 12 coeurs, 14 of them for visualization with 28 GPUs on NVIDIA K80 cards.
- A total of 36 000 Gigabytes of system memory, 5.33 GB per core.
- A high-speed interconnect network InfiniBand FDR (56 GBps) between nodes.
- +900TB High Performance Distributed and Parallel Storage Spectrum Scale.
- Compute nodes are exclusively cooled with warm water using the BULL’s Direct Liquid Cooling concept reducing by third the electrical consumption.
- Facilities are located in the Nantes Central Campus secured by survey cameras and limited nominative card access and personal pin.
Services
- Compute OnDemand
- HPC and 3D Remote Visualization optimized through a web portal BULL XCS.
- Submissions batch system with SLURM.
- Technical Support done by HPC and system experts.
- Training Courses OnDemand; Linux, HPC, parallel programming, etc.
- Courses and Tutorials are freely available online as Open Licence.
Example of MRE applications
- Monolithic approach and fluid coupling (air) / fluid (water) / structure (wind)
- Immersed Volume Methods
- Adaptive multiphase flow model and discrete by finite elements
- Development of a direct model, without simplifications
- Multiphase CFD massively parallel code, highly scalable and associated to the Pays de la Loire Area SuperComputing Facilities.
- Wind turbines and offshore wind turbines simulations, simulation based on actual data (laser, satellites, sonar, etc.), aerodynamic simulation on submersive objects and simulations of swells, currents and seabeds.
