Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has delivered a new supercomputer to CRIANN (Centre Régional Informatique et d’Applications Numériques de Normandie), a high-performance computing (HPC) system and facility in France.

The company this week announced that a new AI supercomputer, called Austral, was inaugurated this month at the CRIANN data center in Normandy.

The new Cray XD2000-based system will be used to train AI models and run simulations and analysis in areas including climate modeling, biotechnology, healthcare, and materials science.

“Through our latest collaboration with CRIANN, users across public and private organizations will gain access to tools to create reliable and explainable AI models to make scientific discoveries and advance R&D,” said Justin Hotard, EVP and general manager, HPC, AI & Labs at HPE.

Austral will be hosted at CRIANN’s site in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray in a customized HPE HPC pod, which will use direct liquid cooling (DLC). It will deliver more than 2 petaflops of peak performance.

The system is equipped with 124 AMD Genoa 9654 nodes, 224 Intel Cooper Lake cores, and 11 AMD Rome nodes each equipped with 8 Nvidia A100 GPUs.

“CRIANN is committed to providing high-performance computing and data services to the research and education community in Normandy, as well as to the private sector,” said Hervé Prigent, managing director at CRIANN. “With Austral, we have a powerful and flexible platform that will enable us to run a wide range of applications and workflows, from simulations and modeling to AI and data analytics. We are excited to work with HPE to build Austral and enhance our HPC capabilities.”

Austral was co-funded by the Normandy Region, the French State, and the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

CRIANN is also home to the Atos/Bull-based Myria system, first deployed in 2017.