Atos and NVIDIA are partners in different fields such as supercomputers, edge solutions and health with the Clara platform. On November 15, they announced the creation of a new artificial intelligence laboratory, the Excellence AI Lab (EXAIL), where scientists and researchers will aim to accelerate the progress of computing technologies, education and research in Europe using high performance computing and AI. The initial work of the lab will focus on five research areas: climate research, health and genome analysis, hybridization with quantum computing, edge AI/computer vision and cybersecurity.

For this work, Atos will develop a BullSequana X supercomputer with NVIDIA’s Arm Grace processor, Ampere Next next-generation GPU, Atos’ Exascale Interconnect BXI solution and NVIDIA’s Quantum-2 Infiniband networking platform, which enables predictive performance as if the application was running on a dedicated system.

Predicting and Combating Global Warming

Atos and Nvidia will be using the Atos JUWELLS supercomputer, which has benefited from NVIDIA’s GPU architectures to help combat climate change. Commenting on this, Agnès Boudot, Senior Vice President, Director of HPC & Quantum activities at Atos said:

“This year at SC’20 we are highlighting how Atos is enabling faster, smarter and greener simulation – and the JUWELS supercomputing system is a great example of this. It has been fantastic to work with Jülich and its partners to deliver this increased performance and power to drive unprecedented research and innovation in Europe.”

For his part, Ian Buck, general manager and vice president of accelerated computing at Nvidia said:

“Our A100 Tensor Core GPUs featured in this ‘booster’ module are based on NVIDIA’s Ampere architecture, a revolutionary technical achievement that delivers a massive performance improvement over the previous generation for AI learning and inference. This datacenter-scale platform with GPU computing units and the Mellanox HDR InfiniBand network enables Jülich researchers to embark on the development and deployment of accelerated data analytics, HPC and AI to meet the challenges of the exascale AI era.”

As a result, Atos and NVIDIA researchers will run new AI and deep learning models on the Juwell supercomputer based at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany. These large-scale models can be used to predict the evolution of extreme weather events such as heat waves, hurricanes, etc.

Atos and NVIDIA hope to gain a better understanding of the changing behaviour of these weather phenomena due to global warming through exascale computing. Andy Grant, vice president of global sales, HPC,AI and Quantomm at Atos said:

“Atos is firmly committed to its decarbonisation ambitions of offsetting all our residual emissions by 2028 to achieve “net zero emissions” and achieving the SBTi goal of reducing our global carbon emissions under our control and influence by 50% by 2025, Many leading climate modelling centres, such as Météo France, DKRZ, KNMI and AEMet, use our BullSequana supercomputers to run their large scale weather and climate models. The announcement of the EXAIL lab illustrates our continued commitment to this area, one year after the creation of our centre of excellence in weather and climate modelling with ECMWF.”

At Nvidia, Ian Buck, Vice President and General Manager, Accelerated Computing, commented:

“As climate change intensifies and increases the frequency of extreme weather events that disrupt entire regions, costing governments and economies hundreds of billions of euros each year, EXAIL’s goal is to advance critical research to address the urgent global challenges of climate change.”

Boosting medical research

Computational processing of genomic data is revolutionising drug development and healthcare. The Clara framework, developed by NVIDIA, will be used by the researchers, its computational performance is very attractive for applications in medical imaging, genomics and computational chemistry.

The new EXAIL lab is expected to accelerate drug discovery and the design of advanced diagnostic solutions using embedded systems, edge computing, data centers and cloud platforms.

Advancing quantum research

Quantum is expected to solve some complex problems faster than the most powerful HPC systems today. In 2016, Atos launched a quantum program led by a high-level advisory board and implemented by the Atos Quantum Lab.

Quantum Learning Machine, a quantum simulation and software development platform, will use NVIDIA GPUs to help dramatically increase the speed and scale of quantum simulations, accelerating research into quantum algorithms, quantum information science, new quantum processor architectures, and hybrid system architectures combining quantum and GPUs.

Accelerating Computer Vision

EXAIL research teams will work to accelerate advances in Computer Vision and 5G wireless infrastructure through six Atos labs equipped with NVIDIA Fleet Command technology to ensure secure application deployment and management.

Developing Zero Trust Cybersecurity

EXAIL’s research teams also aim to develop a new data-center-to-edge “Zero Trust” cybersecurity platform, which will leverage Nvidia’s Morpheus open AI framework as well as new AI models to instantly detect new cybersecurity threats.

Translated from Excellence AI Lab, le nouveau laboratoire d’Atos et NVIDIA qui fonctionnera avec le supercalculateur BullSequana X