France’s Atos aims to double its global market share in supercomputing to about 16 percent by around 2026.
Supercomputing leaders are Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Lenovo Group. Other rivals include China’s Sugon and Japan’s Fujitsu.
The technology and IT consulting firm presented on Wednesday a new generation of supercomputer, dubbed BullSequana XH3000, able to perform up to one billion operations per second.
This level of calculation capacity will help with challenges ranging from simulating the effects of new drugs and nuclear fission to forecasting weather and climate change, said a news report in Reuters.com.
“It’s like a chassis that will carry any engine, and link it to other chassis in order to carry more load,” said Arnaud Bertrand, the head of strategy and innovation at Atos’ cybersecurity and supercomputing unit BDS.
The BullSequana XH3000 is planned to be available from Q4 2022.
For more details, go to https://atos.net/en/solutions/high-performance-computing-hpc/bullsequana-x-supercomputers#bullsequana-xh3000.
Bertrand said Atos was aiming to double its global market share in supercomputing over the next three to four years from about 8 percent currently. The group doesn’t disclose its financial targets for the activity.
Atos’s supercomputer, designed and made in the city of Angers in western France, delivers six times more computing power than its previous version, the company said.
Atos is the only major European manufacturer of high performance computing products (HPC), a technology deemed strategic by France and the European Union, which co-finances EuroHPC, a joint venture between European countries and private organisations.
EuroHPC is one of Atos’ top three clients, along with France’s atomic energy commission CEA and the government of India.
Key components of Atos’ supercomputers still come from Asia and the United States, however. The group is aiming to relocate part of the production in Europe, Bertrand said.
Atos claims the product will have a six-year life cycle and that it is an open architecture capable of housing up to 38 blades. The blades can accommodate a mix of different XPU processors, with more under consideration and development.
The rapid rise in large data sets and evolving AI/machine learning (ML) algorithms have driven this global appetite for greater compute capacity — an appetite that many data scientists believe will only be sated once quantum computers reach commercial viability.
Atos’ early lead in quantum simulators and alliances with various quantum systems vendors imply the company will be capable of pivoting its high-performance computing (HPC) offerings quickly to accommodate the addition of commercial-grade quantum processors when they arrive, TBR’s principal analyst Geoff Woollacott said in a research note.
