The Maison de l’Intelligence Artificielle (MIA) in Sophia Antipolis will soon be equipped with a computing platform. Researchers, students and start-ups will thus be able to access a high quality infrastructure to carry out projects linked to AI and machine learning. Hewlett Packard Entreprise (HPE) is the group selected by the Alpes-Maritimes department and the Université Côte d’Azur, which are financing the project, to design this supercomputer.

The design of this computing platform is part of the “SMART Deal” project of Charles-Ange Ginésy, President of the Alpes-Maritimes Department, founder and President of the MIA joint venture. The modernization of the administration’s operations and the improvement of the services provided to users while meeting the challenges of the territory are part of this digital transition plan.

In order to support this mission, a partnership with HPE has been finalised with the aim of developing an infrastructure combining high computing capacity with intelligent storage. Charles-Ange Ginésy said of the importance of this supercomputer:

“The computing platform provided by HPE fits into this perspective and will be shared with free access. This new generation, high performance solution will be made available to start-ups hosted at the MIA, to experimental projects for the region, but also to students at the Université Côte d’Azur to enable them to carry out various research and innovation projects.

The MIA was inaugurated in March 2020: through it, we hope to instill a national, perhaps European dynamic around Artificial Intelligence, in order to win our place on the international scene, currently dominated by America and Asia.”

The MIA will offer permanent access to this supercomputer to students and researchers from the Université Côte d’Azur, but also to start-ups from the region hosted on site thanks to a partnership with the PACA-Est incubator. They will be able to process their complex tasks and deep learning models.

Jérôme Riboulon, Hybrid IT’s regional pre-sales director and director of the HPE R&D center in Sophia Antipolis spoke about HPE’s involvement in the project:

“We are proud to collaborate with the Maison de l’Intelligence Artificielle to support research efforts and help foster France’s overall AI initiatives. Our innovations and expertise in high-performance computing and our smart data platform provide the Alpes-Maritimes Department and its academic and institutional partners with an ideal environment to support the complex modelling, simulation, AI and analysis tasks of the Maison de l’Intelligence Artificielle”

This supercomputer will be built by HPE Pointnext Services, which will rely on NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 GPUs combined with HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 Systems designed for high performance computing and deep learning capabilities. The system will be used in a variety of projects, including the development of the next generation of self-driving cars, accelerating cancer research, and detecting, recognising and counting wolves in the Mercantour Park.

Translated from HPE construira un supercalculateur au sein de la Maison de l’Intelligence Artificielle