Atos Petascale HPC in Bulgaria Based on BullSequana XH2000 Architecture

Atos SE announces that Bulgaria’s new EuroHPC HPC, which is based on Atos’ BullSequana XH2000 architecture, is delivered and assembled at Sofia Tech Park.

Atos was selected to build Bulgaria’s petascale HPC by the European HPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), the hosting entity, and the consortium Petascale HPC Bulgaria (PetaSC-Bulgaria) whose leading partner is Sofia Tech Park.

This will be the most powerful HPC in Eastern Europe and will help to leverage Bulgaria’s high-tech ambitions. Atos’ Czech Republic project teams have already started the configuration tests and the HPC is expected to start working operationally in July 2021.

The HPC will help improve European scientific research and foster innovation by providing access to HPC infrastructure and services to a range of users from the scientific research community, industry and the public sector.

It will serve the development of scientific, public and industrial applications in fields including bioinformatics, pharmacy, molecular dynamics and mechanics, quantum chemistry and biochemistry, AI, personalized medicine, bioengineering, meteorology, and the fight vs. climate change.

“We are impressed by the professionalism of the Atos team. The work on the delivery and installation of the machine is ahead of schedule. The big challenge for the Consortium ‘Petascale HPC – Bulgaria’ team is building and making a valuable connection between the academy, the industry, the Sofia Tech Park, and the petascale computer. In this regard, we communicate with the existing EuroHPC centers and have initiated meetings with the academy and industry representatives. We already have the first requests for solving pragmatic tasks in chemistry, medicine, and biology. Of course, we are also looking forward to the future – we are talking with Atos to add their platform and experience in quantum computers“, said Peter Statev, chairman of the supervisory board, Sofia Tech Park.

“As Europe’s leading supercomputing manufacturer, we are proud to be supporting researchers in industry and universities across Europe accelerate scientific discovery and to develop solutions for current challenges such as those in health, energy and agriculture. The use of AI in research has increased the need for more flexibility and more versatility in supercomputing, which is exactly what we can provide with our BullSequana XH2000 so that our customers can benefit from the new capacities of hybrid workloads,” said Agnès Boudot, SVP, head of HPC and Quantum, Atos.

Technical specs
The size of the RAM reaches over 300TB and the number of cores is 144,384, while the computer is built on AMD EPYC processors cooled by hot water and has a fast disk storage with a capacity of 2PB. The entire system is backed up vs. a power failure by an uninterruptible power supply with an output of 1MW. The size of the system is 12 computing racks and 2 racks with auxiliary infrastructure. The whole complex weighs over 30 tons.