Contract Signed for Alice Recoque, Europe's New Exascale Supercomputer

Alice Recoque, named after a pioneering French computer scientist, will be Europe's newest exascale supercomputer, capable of performing over one billion billion calculations per second: a task that would take a person with a calculator billions of years to complete! 

Designed to address Europe’s most pressing societal, scientific and industrial challenges, it will integrate large-scale numerical simulation, data analytics, AI capabilities and early hybrid quantum computing capabilities within a single, energy-efficient environment. 

Its flexible architecture will enable researchers and innovators to process, analyse, and store vast datasets seamlessly, delivering the speed and scale needed for breakthroughs that were simply not possible before.

Beyond scientific research, Alice Recoque will serve as a backbone for Europe's network of AI Factories, providing European startups and SMEs with the computing power to compete globally, and strengthening European technological sovereignty.

Anders Jensen, EuroHPC JU Executive Director stated:

“As Europe has officially entered the exascale era, I am delighted to soon welcome Alice Recoque to our EuroHPC fleet. This groundbreaking exascale supercomputer, powered by pioneering European technologies, will elevate scientific discovery, industrial innovation, and technological sovereignty to the next level, while ensuring exceptional energy efficiency. ”

Philippe Lavocat, CEO of GENCI declared:

"In the global race to harness computing power as the engine of scientific discovery and innovation, EuroHPC’s decision to select Eviden and embrace sovereign technologies for the Alice Recoque Exascale supercomputer marks a defining milestone for Europe and France. Building on a collaborative journey that began three years ago, GENCI and all members of the Jules Verne consortium are extremely proud in their pivotal role in bringing this groundbreaking Exascale system to life—a true game changer for research and industry. By paving the path toward post-Exascale services, Alice Recoque will propel Europe “Beyond HPC,” federating high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and quantum technologies to empower science, accelerate innovation, and strengthen our technological sovereignty and global competitiveness” 

More details

Built by Eviden, the Alice Recoque supercomputer will rely on an unprecedented blend of European high-performance technologies to deliver exascale-class performance with strong energy efficiency. 

Its architecture will be based on the new Eviden Sequana XH3500 platform, integrating a unified compute partition with AMD Venice 256-core processors and next-generation AMD MI430x GPUs in a coherent-memory configuration. It will also include a scalar partition that will use European SiPearl RHEA2 ARM processors, which were developed in the framework of the European Processor Initiative (EPI). All these compute partitions will be federated by a high-speed Bull BXI v3 interconnect allowing endpoint connection speeds of CPUs and GPUs of 400 and 800 Gb/s respectively, and will share access to a data-centric storage architecture.

The system will employ warm-water direct-liquid cooling for the unified racks and chilled-door technologies for the scalar racks, and will be operated through a unified administration and resource-management framework based on CEA’ Ocean suite completed by Eviden’s management suite with widely used open-source components such as SLURM, Kubernetes, LUSTRE, Grafana or Prometheus.  This next-generation infrastructure will provide a robust, secure and sustainable platform for advanced simulation, data analytics and AI workloads.

Owned by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, the new system will be hosted and operated by the Jules Verne consortium, led by France through GENCI and the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA), with the participation of the Netherlands through SURF and Greece through GRNet. 

GENCI, as Hosting Entity, will manage the project. CEA, as Hosting Site, will operate this new EuroHPC supercomputer. Alice Recoque will be located at CEA’s supercomputing centre TGCC (Très Grand Centre de calcul du CEA) in Bruyères-le-Châtel, France.

Alice Recoque will be co-funded with a total budget of EUR 354 800 000 for the acquisition, delivery, installation and maintenance of the system. The EuroHPC JU will fund 50% of the total cost, with budget stemming from the Digital Europe Programme (DEP), while the other 50% will be funded by France, the Netherlands and Greece within the Jules Verne consortium.

Like all EuroHPC supercomputers, this EuroHPC exascale supercomputer will be made available to a wide range of users in the scientific community, industries, and the public sector, located across Europe. The allocation of computing resources will be a collaborative effort between the EuroHPC JU and Jules Verne consortium in proportion to their investments. 

The installation of the system will start in 2026. 

More details can be found in the press release of GENCI.

Background

Eviden has been selected following a call for tender launched in September 2024.

The EuroHPC JU is a legal and funding entity that brings together the European Union and participating countries to coordinate efforts and pool resources with the objective of making Europe a world leader in supercomputing.    

To equip Europe with a cutting-edge supercomputing infrastructure, the EuroHPC JU has already procured 11 supercomputers, distributed across Europe including JUPITER in Germany, Europe’s first exascale system. 

European scientists and users from the public sector and industry can benefit from EuroHPC supercomputers via the EuroHPC Access Calls no matter where in Europe they are located, to advance science and support the development of a wide range of applications with industrial, scientific and societal relevance for Europe. 

Currently, the EuroHPC JU is also overseeing the implementation of 19 AI factories (AIF) across Europe, complemented by  thirteen AI Factory Antennas, to offer free, customised support to SMEs and startups. Alice Recoque is at the heart of the AI Factory France project.

Additionally, the EuroHPC JU is deploying a European Quantum Computing infrastructure, integrating diverse European quantum computing technologies with existing supercomputers. EuroHPC JU has already inaugurated PIAST-Q in Poznań, Poland, VLQ in Ostrava, Czechia, and just last week, Jade and Ruby - the HPCQS quantum simulators, marking a milestone in Europe’s leap into the quantum era. 

The EuroHPC JU also funds  research and innovation projects to develop a full European supercomputing supply chain, from processors and software to applications to be run on these supercomputers and know-how to develop strong European HPC expertise.