Sept. 11, 2024 — The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has launched a call for tender to select a vendor for the acquisition, delivery, installation and maintenance of Alice Recoque, the European exascale supercomputer to be located in France.

The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking seeks to procure a second European exascale system. It will be named Alice Recoque, in honour to a French computer scientist pioneer, and will be capable of performing over one billion billion calculations per second. This next-generation supercomputer is another significant technological milestone for Europe. The Alice Recoque supercomputer will tackle Europe’s most pressing societal, scientific and industrial challenges by integrating large-scale numerical simulations, extensive data analysis, and artificial intelligence (AI).

The Alice Recoque supercomputer will have a state-of-the-art, energy-efficient architecture that includes multiple computing, pre/post-processing, and service partitions. These partitions will be linked up by a high-speed internal interconnect, and allow shared access to a tiered data-centric storage architecture. It will be managed by a unified system administration and resource management stack.

The deadline to submit a request to participate in this procurement process is October 30, 2024, 17:00 CET.

Following this deadline, the EuroHPC JU will review the submissions and initiate a competitive dialogue. This process will allow EuroHPC JU, as the contracting authority, to engage in detailed discussions with selected candidates. Through these discussions, EuroHPC JU will thoroughly evaluate the market’s technical offerings and select the most suitable solutions.

Upon completion of the dialogue phase, the candidates will be invited to submit a tender. The EuroHPC JU will evaluate these tenders, select the best offer and conclude a contract with the chosen provider to acquire, deliver, install and maintain this new EuroHPC supercomputer.

The technological solutions to be procured are expected to outperform existing solutions regarding several of the following aspects:

• Performance/TCO
• Programmability and usability
• Versatility
• System stability
• Power and energy efficiency
• Computing density

The Alice Recoque supercomputer will be hosted and operated by the Jules Verne consortium, led by France through GENCI and CEA, with the participation of the Netherlands through SURF. GENCI, as Hosting Entity, will manage this new EuroHPC supercomputer, which will be located and operated at CEA’s supercomputing center TGCC (Très Grand Centre de calcul du CEA) in Bruyères-le-Châtel, France as Hosting Site.

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Source: EuroHPC JU