Atos’ BullSequana powers the first EuroHPC supercomputer operational at IZUM in Slovenia

Based on Atos’ BullSequana XH2000, the ‘Vega’ supercomputer was inaugurated at the Institute of Information Science (IZUM) in Slovenia

Atos and the Institute of Information Science (IZUM) in Maribor, Slovenia, announce that the first EuroHPC supercomputer is now operational. This is the ‘Vega’ supercomputer, based on Atos’ BullSequana XH2000 architecture, which is now installed following a start-up ceremony hosted by IZUM with the Prime Minister of the Republic of Slovenia, Janez Janša, in attendance, together with the Executive Vice-President of the European Commission Margrethe Vestager, the Minister of Education, Science and Sport Dr. Simona Kustec and the Executive Director of EuroHPC Joint Undertaking Anders Dam Jensen.

Vega, the largest supercomputer in the country, is based at IZUM, a public infrastructural institution and research organization established by the Government of the Republic of Slovenia. It will be used to support the development of leading scientific, public sector and industrial applications in many domains, including personalized medicine, bio-engineering, weather forecasting, fight against climate change and discovering new materials and drugs.

It will provide researchers from Slovenia and the EuroHPC network with a modern infrastructure delivering maximum performance for computing, data processing, high-performance data analysis (HPDA), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning model development with fast network connectivity to other computing centers in Slovenia and Europe.

Dr. Aleš Bošnjak, Director of IZUM: “We’re delighted to announce the start-up of the first EuroHPC supercomputer here in Slovenia. Now we can drive forward our research and innovation projects, in particular our HPC RIVR project design goals, supporting Slovenian and European researchers and users from the public and industry sectors, to meet new challenges and further contribute to the regional and European HPC initiatives.”

Named Vega, after Slovenian mathematician Jurij Vega, the new petascale supercomputer will be co-owned and jointly operated by the EuroHPC JU (The European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking). Capable of executing more than 6,8 petaflops (6,8 million billion calculations per second), the system will be amongst the world's top 50 supercomputers.

Agnes Boudot, Senior Vice President, Head of HPC & Quantum at Atos concluded “As the leading European supercomputer manufacturer, we are proud to be contributing towards advancing research and innovation in Slovenia and in Europe. ‘Vega’, as part of the EuroHPC program and network, is part of a European worldclass supercomputing ecosystem and will help Europe compete globally in strategic domains such as artificial intelligence, bio-engineering and the fight against climate change."

Atos was awarded a 5-year €17.3 million euro contract to supply, install and maintain the BullSequana XH2000 ‘Vega’ supercomputer.

Source: Atos media announcement