Eviden and AMD announced their selection to build Alice Recoque, a next-generation supercomputer to support the need for scientific computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI), serving as an AI Factory. Alice Recoque will be France's first and Europe's second Exascale supercomputer, a machine to expand Europe's AI and research capabilities while ensuring energy efficiency and sovereignty. This project, led by France GENCI, operated by CEA, will have the capacity to surpass one Exaflop per second (i.e. a billion billion calculations per second) for scientific simulation.
This extreme performance, equivalent to more calculations than humanity could accomplish in four years of relentless mental computation, will mark a fiftyfold an increase in the computing capacity compared to the previous system, while only leveraging by 5 the electrical power. This project, representing an overall cost of 554 million euros over 5 years of operation, is funded by EuroHPC JU, with budget stemming from the Digital Europe Programme (DEP), and by the Jules Verne consortium, led by France through GENCI and CEA with the participation of Netherlands with SURF and Greece with GRNET. In addition, Alice Recoque will welcome a scalar compute partition based on the European Rhea2 processor developed by SiPearl.
The entire system will be interconnected by Eviden's network solution (BXIv3) into its newest BullSequana XH3500 platform, along with storage solutions provided by DDN. This powerful ecosystem will enhance climate modeling, accelerate innovation in materials and energy, enable digital twins for personalized medicine, and support next-gen European foundational AI models. It will also address the vast amount of data generated by scientific instruments such as telescopes, satellites as well as IoT devices, and AI applications, driving breakthroughs across multiple domains.
As a result of a shared ambition for technological sovereignty, the Alice Recoque system will integrate various European technologies, including some critical components. The entire system will be connected through the Eviden's BXIv3 networking technology, an efficient European alternative for interconnecting converged HPC/AI systems. On top of the Exascale system, an additional partition will integrate European SiPearl Rhea2 CPU to increase the system computation capacities. With nearly three-quarters of the production of the BullSequana XH35000 components relocated to Europe, Eviden ensures full traceability, regulatory compliance, and reduced geopolitical risks - aligning with Europe's climate goals and reinforcing digital sovereignty through secure, sustainable, and high-performance AI-HPC technologies.
Composed of 94 racks, Alice Recoque is expected to be one of the top supercomputers in Europe for double-precision HPC workloads. Building on this foundation, it will also offer exceptional memory performance enabling deeper insights, faster simulations, and more scientific breakthroughs. To achieve these capabilities, Alice Recoque will encompass future-ready, modular and scalable components into Eviden's recently unveiled BullSequana XH 3500 architecture to address the growing demands of HPC, AI and quantum computing.
