Atos announced that it has been chosen to provide the pre-exascale system to be hosted by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, in Spain, as part of the EuroHPC JU (European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking). MareNostrum5 will rank amongst the world's top supercomputers and will pave the way toward exascale capabilities: the next supercomputing era. This new system will support the EU's mission to provide European scientists and industry with access to cutting-edge HPC infrastructures and services, with the main objective to strengthen medical research capabilities across Europe.

Atos is already supporting Europe's HPC capabilities by providing pre-exascale systems for five other EuroHPC projects out of eight. With a power capacity up to 314 Petaflops, or at least 314 million billion calculations per second, the system called MareNostrum5 is tailored to boost European medical research through drug research, the development of vaccines, virus spread simulations as well as artificial intelligence and big data processing applications. The system will also unlock computing performance for HPC specific complex applications, such as climate research, engineering, material science and earth sciences, which require to be managed out of the cloud.

As the prime contractor, Atos will manage the delivery of the entire MareNostrum5 supercomputer in close cooperation with European technology specialist ParTec AG, who will provide core parts of the solution and support Atos in the technical coordination of the project. A large accelerator partition will be based on Atos' recently announced BullSequana XH3000 next-gen hybrid architecture – the installation worldwide – integrating GPU nodes using NVIDIA's H100 Tensor Core GPU, based on the new Hopper™ architecture and with 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (codenamed Sapphire Rapids). Atos will also deliver nodes with NVIDIA's Grace™ CPU Superchip for the next-generation general purpose technology evaluation partition.

The Lenovo general purpose compute partition, provided through ParTec AG, will be based on Lenovo ThinkSystem SD650 V3 Neptune™ nodes with 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors – to build one of the general purpose scientific supercomputer worldwide. The storage part of the system, also provided through ParTec AG, will use IBM Spectrum Scale global data platform. Both the accelerator and general purpose compute partitions will benefit from advanced Direct Liquid Cooling solutions to provide an extremely energy-efficient system.

MareNostrum5 will be interconnected with the NVIDIA Quantum-2 400Gb/s InfiniBand networking platform.