Atos and NVIDIA to Advance Climate and Healthcare Research With Exascale Computing
Nov. 15, 2021 -- Atos and NVIDIA today announced the Excellence AI Lab (EXAIL), which brings together scientists and researchers to help advance European computing technologies, education and research.
The lab’s first research projects will focus on five key areas enabled by advances in high performance computing and AI: climate research, healthcare and genomics, hybridization with quantum computing, edge AI/computer vision and cybersecurity.
Atos will develop an exascale-class BullSequana X supercomputer with NVIDIA’s Arm-based Grace CPU, NVIDIA’s next-generation GPU, Atos BXI Exascale Interconnect and NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking platform.
Predicting and Addressing Climate Change
In an effort to more accurately predict climate change, researchers from Atos and NVIDIA will run new AI and deep learning models on Europe’s fastest supercomputer at the Jülich Supercomputing Center. Such giant-scale models can be used to predict the evolution of extreme weather events and their changing behavior due to global warming, and they will benefit greatly from exascale-class computing.
The JUWELS Booster system, based on Atos’ BullSequana XH2000 platform, with nearly 2.5 exaflops of AI and 3,744 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking, will help provide deeper understanding of climate change and more accurate long-term predictions of events, such as hurricanes, extreme precipitation, and heat and cold waves.
“Atos is strongly committed to its decarbonization objectives, which are to offset all of our residual emissions by 2028 to reach ‘net zero,’ and to reach the SBTi target to reduce our global carbon emissions under our control and influence by 50 percent by 2025,” said Andy Grant, vice president of global sales for HPC, AI and Quantum at Atos. “Many leading climate modeling centers, such as Meteo France, DKRZ, KNMI and AEMet, are using our BullSequana supercomputers to run their large weather and climate models, and the current EXAIL announcement is a clear demonstration of our commitment, one year after the creation of our Center of Excellence in Weather and Climate Modelling with ECMWF.”
“Climate change intensifies and increases the frequency of extreme weather events that disrupt entire regions, costing governments and economies hundreds of billions each year,” said Ian Buck, vice president and general manager of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA. “The goal for EXAIL is to advance vital research to address pressing global challenges surrounding climate change.”
Accelerating Medical Research With HPC, Quantum and AI
Supercharging medical breakthroughs with computational genomics is revolutionizing drug discovery and healthcare. Atos’ Life Sciences Center of Excellence has partnered with 40 leading institutions to leverage HPC, quantum computing and AI to advance medical imaging, genomics and pharmaceuticals. The NVIDIA Clara healthcare application framework provides supercomputing performance for genomics, healthcare imaging and computational chemistry applications.
EXAIL will harness Atos’ advanced computing solutions and NVIDIA Clara to help healthcare researchers and providers accelerate drug discovery and design advanced diagnostic solutions using embedded, edge, data center and cloud platforms.
Advancing Quantum Research
Quantum computing holds the potential to solve complex problems in fields like drug discovery, climate research, machine learning, logistics and finance. But much research remains before quantum computers become viable.
Atos’ Quantum Learning Machine, a quantum software development and simulation appliance for the coming quantum computer era, enables researchers and engineers to develop and experiment with quantum software. It will use NVIDIA GPUs to help dramatically increase the speed and scale of quantum simulations. This will speed the research in quantum algorithms, quantum information science, new quantum processor architectures and hybrid quantum-GPU system architectures.
Accelerating Computer Vision
Using Atos’ edge appliances, such as its BullSequana Edge which runs on NVIDIA BlueField DPUs, the research teams at EXAIL will work together to accelerate computer vision and 5G wireless infrastructure. Six Atos labs around the world dedicated to computer vision will be equipped with the latest NVIDIA Fleet Command technology for secure deployment and management of AI applications across distributed edge infrastructure.
Advancing Zero-Trust Cybersecurity
Furthermore, the EXAIL research teams will develop a new data-center-to-edge, zero-trust cybersecurity platform leveraging the NVIDIA Morpheus open AI framework, as well as new AI models to instantly detect new cybersecurity threats.
About Atos
Atos is a global leader in digital transformation with 107,000 employees and annual revenue of over € 11 billion. European number one in cybersecurity, cloud and high performance computing, the Group provides tailored end-to-end solutions for all industries in 71 countries. A pioneer in decarbonization services and products, Atos is committed to a secure and decarbonized digital for its clients. Atos is a SE (Societas Europaea), listed on Euronext Paris and included on the CAC 40 ESG and Next 20 Paris Stock Indexes. The purpose of Atos is to help design the future of the information space. Its expertise and services support the development of knowledge, education and research in a multicultural approach and contribute to the development of scientific and technological excellence. Across the world, the Group enables its customers and employees, and members of societies at large to live, work and develop sustainably, in a safe and secure information space.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA‘s invention of the GPU in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market and has redefined modern computer graphics, high performance computing and artificial intelligence. The company’s pioneering work in accelerated computing and AI is reshaping trillion-dollar industries, such as transportation, healthcare and manufacturing, and fueling the growth of many others. More information at https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/.
Source: NVIDIA
