France is about to go exascale with a supercomputer of the future, “Alice Recoque”, that would combine both extreme computing power and advanced AI capabilities. The computer, a tribute to French computer science pioneer Alice Recoque, will be constructed by Eviden, the Atos Group brand for advanced computing, in partnership with AMD, and will be located at the CEA’s Very Large Computing Center (TGCC) near Paris.
The work is the core of the AI Factory France program, a national initiative to enhance research, strengthen digital sovereignty, and speed up Europe’s AI and HPC ambitions. In addition to being funded by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and the Jules Verne consortium, the installation stands for a net total of €554 million over five years.
A Milestone For France and Europe
French Minister for Higher Education, Research and Space Philippe Baptiste referred to the selection of Eviden as “a major step forward” for European technological leadership. He also linked the supercomputer directly to climate modelling, healthcare research, materials science, and emerging quantum technologies.
The first exascale supercomputer in Europe, Alice Recoque, might be able to perform up to one exaflop for double-precision operations—thus making it one of the most powerful machines ever installed in Europe. Despite the fact, TGCC is planning to raise its computing power by fifty times while increasing the electricity consumption only five times, thus showing that efficiency and sustainability are the main focus.
On the front of the tech stack, Alice Recoque has the BullSequana XH3500 architecture of Eviden as its core.
Accelerated nodes will have the next-generation AMD EPYC processors, AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs from the MI400 Series, and AMD FPGAs. Besides, a scalar computing unit based on Rhea2 processor from SiPearl will be there in the system that is placing European chip design right in the center of one of the most significant HPC builds in the continent.
Moreover, BXIv3 interconnect from Eviden will be used for the connectivity purposes while the storage will be provisioned by DDN. The mixture of purely European components and globally renowned technology partners is at the core of the project’s strategic objectives.
According to French Minister of State for AI and Digital Affairs Anne Le Hénanff, the supercomputer can be seen as a real, tangible, and concrete sign of the implementation of the digital sovereignty agenda in Europe. She referred to the system as “one of the main supports for the future of quantum computing and artificial intelligence.”
The supercomputer Alice Recoque is a platform for scientific and industrial breakthroughs. According to the company, this platform will be able to carry out some of the most arduous workloads of the continent such as large-scale climate models, complex healthcare models, and next-gen AI foundation models.
Emmanuel Le Roux, Global Head of Advanced Computing and AI at Eviden, referred to the supercomputer as “a driver of scientific and industrial breakthroughs”, and was particularly concerned with its role in Europe becoming less dependent technologically.
CEA, the host, and operator of the supercomputer, underscored the value of incorporating locally developed technologies such as SiPearl’s Rhea2 processor and Eviden’s BXI network. According to Anne-Isabelle Etienvre, General Administrator of CEA, the installation is a demonstration of Europe’s capacities in the building of major research infrastructures with the contribution of European engineering teams.
A Shared European Resource
If we talk about the development of the supercomputer, the partners involved are GENCI, SURF (Netherlands), GRNET (Greece), and EuroHPC JU. The consortium plans to have the system as a shared resource of Europe accessible for researchers, startups, and industries of member states.
Greece’s Minister of Digital Governance Dimitris Papastergiou, while highlighting the connection between the project and Greece’s National AI Strategy, mentioned that it puts the country’s researchers and startups “at the forefront of global AI developments.”
According to EuroHPC JU Executive Director Anders Jensen, Europe has “officially stepped into the exascale era,” and Alice Recoque would be the means to keep energy consumption low while leading to new scientific discoveries.
According to GENCI CEO Philippe Lavocat, the device was a move forward towards future computing environments where HPC, AI, and quantum systems would be combined thus taking Europe “beyond HPC” and into a new era of innovation and competitiveness.
AMD’s Expanding Role in HPC and AI infrastructure
In the situation when there is a major demand for AI compute that radically changes global infrastructure, AMD sees its role in Alice Recoque only as a part of a bigger pledge to high-performance and AI systems. Dan McNamara, senior vice president for compute and enterprise AI at AMD, said that the project “merges national ambition, regional collaboration, and AMD’s compute technologies” to support Europe’s scientific and industrial leadership.”