Somewhere, at the National Computer Center for Higher Education (Cines), in Montpellier (Hérault), hides the most powerful supercomputer in France. In a room plunged into darkness and ultra-secure, almost as much as a military field, this machine cogitates at high speed: the performance of Adastra, the small name of this large computer, climbs to 74 petaflops per second, the unit of measurement of the power of these machines. This new supercomputer, inaugurated with great fanfare this Thursday on the Saint-Priest campus, is twice as powerful as Jean Zaythe behemoth of the Institute for Development and Resources in Scientific Computing (Idris) of the CNRS, near Paris, whose performance has peaked since last year at 36.8 petaflops.
Adastra, which entered service in January, also shines globally: it ranks 11th among the most powerful supercomputers in the world, according to the latest Top 500, established in November 2022. “We are proud, because it is the first time since the creation of Cines that a machine, at its inauguration, is so highly placed in the world rankings,” says Michel Robert, the director of Cines. But technology runs at the speed of light. “No doubt that from June, we will lose places, it is the natural life of progress”, relativizes the Montpellier professor.
A great tool for researchers
But, in the meantime, in this temple of computing, we savor. Because Adastra, which cost just under 30 million euros, is a great tool for researchers. This state-of-the-art supercomputer will allow them to carry out, in record time, extraordinary scientific simulations, purely and simply impossible to accomplish on a traditional computer: modeling of extreme weather events, experiments on the efficiency of giant wind farms , work on the design of rocket engines… Or to train artificial intelligence.
Adastra has another quality: its energy sobriety. This extreme computer climbs to third place in the Green 500the ranking of supercomputers combining performance with energy savings, ahead of two big American bikes.
Supercomputer, but… super green, too
And in addition to being green, Adastra pushes for sobriety: users who connect to this advanced computer for their work have the possibility, live, to see what they consume. A tool that allows researchers to make “compromises” if they wish, explains Alain Melon, director of HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise) in France. “We can choose speed, to get results more quickly. But the faster it goes, the more it consumes. Or we choose to consume a little less, and to have results a little later. It is up to each user to manage this compromise. »
And like home computing, the more the years pass, the less space the machines need. At Cines, Adastra no longer occupies more than fifteen square meters. “The supercomputer that was here before [Occigen], was about three times bigger, explains Gabriel Hautreux, the head of intensive calculations. And 20 times less powerful. It’s over forty years of computer history that it makes you even more dizzy: Adastra is… 10 billion times more powerful than the supercomputer installed on this university campus, in 1980, in Montpellier, when Cines was created.