ROMEO HPC Center

ROMEO Super Computer Center

 

The ROMEO is the Regional Super Computer Center hosted by the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne since 2002.

 

As a technological platform and research center, its mission is to deliver high performance computing and Artificial Intelligence resources and expertise for both industrial and academic researchers in the region, along with an entire ecosystem of services like secured storage space, specific software and support in its usage, as well as an in-depth expertise in 3 main application domains:

 

  • mathematics and computer science
  • physics and engineering sciences
  • multiscale molecular modeling.

 

 

Awarded as a CUDA Research Center, University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne is a major player in the field of accelerated computing for research, teaching and production. It increases its expertise in GPU technology since 2010 by operating two full GPU hybrid supercomputers both for Scientific Computing, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence.

 

The main supercomputer, called "ROMEO 2018", is a Bull Sequana X1000 specialised for HPC and Artificial Intelligence. Powered by 280 NVIDIA® Tesla® P100 GPU accelerators and housed in 115 X1125/X1120 servers, the system delivers 1.022 Pflops of performance based on the Linpack benchmark and features a liquid end free-cooling system. Among its features : 3220 CPU cores, 15.5 TB of memory, 1 PB of storage including a Luster parallel file system, a non-blocking BXI 100Gbps interconnect and a Slurm batch system. Roméo was the 19th most energy-efficient supercomputer in the word and one of the most faster (ranked 249th in the TOP500 list, june 2018). Roméo was funded for a total cost of 6.5 M€ by the Regional Council of Grand-Est, Grand Reims, European FEDER funds, and CPER.

 

The previous cluster, installed in 2013 was powered by 260 NVIDIA® Tesla® K20X GPU accelerators housed in 130 Bullx R421 E3 servers, the system delivers 254.9 Tflops of performance based on the Linpack benchmark and features a free-cooling system above the Bull Cool Cabinet Door. Among its features : 2600 CPU cores, 6 TB of memory, 220 TB of storage including a Luster parallel file system, a non-blocking InfiniBand QDR interconnect and a Slurm batch system. Roméo was the 5th most energy-efficient supercomputer in the word and one of the most faster (ranked 151th in the TOP500 list). Roméo was funded for a total cost of 2.4 M€ by the Regional Council of Champagne-Ardenne, Reims Metropolis, European FEDER funds, and the French government’s “Investment for future” program. This supercomputer is now dedicated to experimentations, education and scientific cloud CLOVIS

 

All these resources allow industrial and academic research teams to reduce their investments in equipment and personnel, while taking advantage of the latest technology and a support team of dedicated engineers. This represents a strong advantage in today's competitive environment, where modeling and simulation can significantly cut costs and development times for new research projects. GPU computing is a good example, as this new computing resource allows new industrial challenges to be tackled that have a direct impact on people's lives in areas such as public transportation optimization or the development of new therapeutic approaches.

 

The ROMEO HPC Center has been involved since 2011 in the French Computing strategy as a special tier-2 to tier-1 provisioning center since it is a member of the Equip@meso consortium founded by the French government (Investissements d'Avenir) and coordinated by GENCI (Organization for French High Performance Computing in public research). The scope of this project is to develop 10 medium-sized HPC centers, both in terms of computing power and their ability to develop joint projects with SMEs.

 

 

University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne

The University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (URCA) is a multidisciplinary university which develops innovative, fundamental and applied research in more than 30 laboratories. With 1,557 professors and professor-researchers—including 126 hospital practitioners—as well as a technical and administrative staff of 1,038, URCA hosts more than 23,000 students from undergraduate to doctorate graduation level over the whole Champagne-Ardenne Region: Reims (main site), Troyes, Charleville-Mézières, Châlons en Champagne and Chaumont. Our university makes a large contribution to the development of Champagne-Ardenne through its partnerships with local and national companies and the regional authorities. Located close to the Ile-de-France –30 minutes from central Paris and Roissy Airport by TGV-, the Rhineland and Northern Europe, URCA occupies a geostrategic position which is favorable to European and international exchanges. ROMEO is also a member of the European Technology Platform for HPC (ETP4HPC).

Link : http://www.univ-reims.fr