Curie, a French supercomputer open to European scientists, has joined PRACE. Installed in France at the Très Grand Centre de Calcul (TGCC) operated by CEA near Paris, Curie is the second PRACE Tier-0 system. Funded by GENCI, as the French representative in PRACE, designed and built by Bull, Curie has a general purpose modular architecture, based on a mix of thin and fat nodes.
During last summer, it was extended with a hybrid fraction. This upgrade added 192 Tflops/s (DP) peak performance through 288 Nvidia M2090 GPUs fitted into 144 Bull B505 blades.
Altogether, Curie will deliver a global peak performance of more than 1.7 Pflops/s, by the end of this year.
Curie is the first large scale hybrid system available into PRACE. 'It is important for PRACE to extend its facilities with hybrid supercomputing resources. Curie will be the first of a larger generation of hybrid systems in PRACE. With Curie, European scientists will be able to exploit the potential of these novel system architectures,' commented Dr Maria Ramalho, PRACE managing director.
The whole hybrid fraction of Curie will be opened to European researchers through the 4th PRACE Regular call, starting on 1 November 2011. European researchers will be able to use it for adapting their applications to generate scientific results on hybrid production systems.
