France is to host a latest-generation European supercomputer that will enable a quantum leap in data analysis for artificial intelligence and will be accessible to scientists from 2025.
Baptised ‘Jules Verne,’ the giant computer will be installed in the Paris Region, at the Très Grand Centre de Calcul (Very Large Computing Centre) of the Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, CEA, in Bruyères-le-Châtel (Essonne), the European Commission has announced.
It will be owned by the EuroHPC European Joint Undertaking, which is financing half of the €542 million planned for the acquisition and operation of the computer over five years. The other half is being funded mainly by the French government.
This is the second Exascale supercomputer based on European hardware and software. The first, 'Jupiter,' is due to start up in Germany in 2024.
These giant computers, with a computing power of one billion billion operations per second, represent a change of scale compared with current capabilities. For example, they are a thousand times faster than the Jean-Zay supercomputer, currently the most powerful in France.
Such powerful models are still very rare in the world. The first started up in the United States in 2022.
The use of supercomputers is crucial for science, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence, in order to process massive data in competitive timescales.
