French national aerospace research center ‘The Office National d’Etudes et de Recherches Aérospatiales’ (ONERA) has turned to Japanese IT supplier NEC for a new supercomputer.

Titled ‘Sator,’ the system launched late last year with a 667 teraflop peak performance. ONERA plans to upgrade it to 1.14 petaflops by the end of 2018.

SATOR
– ONERA

Still on Broadwell

Sator sports Intel Broadwell E5-2680v4 processors and Omni-Path interconnect, offering four to five times more performance than ONERA’s previous system.

The high performance computing (HPC) platform is cooled by both air and cold water.

ONERA has roughly 2,000 employees, 75 percent of which are engineers and scientists.The public body is involved in aerospace research and development for the commercial transport industry and defense sectors.

The organization focuses on four distinct scientific branches - Fluid Mechanics and Energetics; Materials and Structures; Physics; and Information Processing and Systems. It also operates Europe’s largest fleet of wind tunnels, including the S1MA installation at Modane-Avrieux, the largest sonic wind tunnel in the world.