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Atos unit Eviden to build a new supercomputer in France

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New machine to use AMD chips

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Project funded by EU governments

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Supercomputer to be used for AI development and scientific

research

By Gianluca Lo Nostro

Nov 18 (Reuters) - Eviden, a division of French IT group

Atos, said on Tuesday it had won a contract together

with U.S. chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices ( AMD ) to build a new

supercomputer in Europe, as the region moves to close the

technology gap with the U.S.

The machine, named after French computer scientist Alice

Recoque, will be installed in France, with construction expected

to start by the end of 2026.

It will be the second exascale supercomputer in Europe, after

Jupiter in Germany, with a total cost estimated at 554 million

euros ($642.5 million) over five years, Eviden said.

Supercomputers are vastly more powerful than traditional

ones, and are considered exascale when their peak performance

exceeds one exaflop, a metric used to measure computing power.

Eviden said the Alice Recoque, which can surpass one

quintillion calculations per second, has computing power

equalling that of 10 million personal computers connected

together.

The global tech industry is scaling up computing and energy

investments to meet the demands of artificial intelligence.

While U.S. tech giants have dominated this space, Europe is

expanding its computing capacity through initiatives like

EuroHPC JU, which pools resources from EU member states.

The new supercomputer project is led by France's

high-performance computing agency GENCI and operated by state

research organization CEA. Funding will be provided by

EuroHPC and by the Jules Verne consortium.

Philippe Lavocat, CEO of GENCI, told Reuters that

sovereignty was a main request from EuroHPC and the French

government.

The computer will be used to advance AI models, climate

change modelling and medical research, he said.

Eviden will incorporate AMD's MI430X chips, part of the MI400

family, and the same generation of graphics processing unit

slated for use by ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.

About 70% of the machine's components will be produced in

Europe, compared with about half for Jupiter.

"We are embedding a new networking technology that replaces

Nvidia ( NVDA ) networking used in Jupiter," said Emmanuel Le

Roux, Eviden's head of advanced computing and AI.

($1 = 0.8622 euros)