General Presentation of Jean Zay
The Supercomputer
The Jean Zay supercomputer © Photothèque CNRS/Cyril Frésillon
Jean Zay is the national supercomputer purchased by the GENCI company and operated by the CNRS at IDRIS. It consists of an HPE SGI 8600 part and a Bull BullSequana XH3000 part for a total peak power of 125.9 PFlop/s (125.9 million trillion floating-point operations per second).
Made available to scientific research communities dependent on high-performance computing, Jean Zay's configuration extends the classic modes of high-performance computing (HPC) to new uses for artificial intelligence (AI).
The complete hardware and software characteristics of the Jean Zay supercomputer are detailed here.
In 2018, the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research acquired the Jean Zay supercomputer through GENCI, as part of the Programme National de Recherche en IA (PNRIA, National AI Research Programme) resulting from the government's AI For Humanity strategy.
The supercomputer was installed at IDRIS during the first half of 2019. It is an HPE SGI 8600 machine with a peak power of 15.9 PFlop/s.
A first extension was installed in the summer of 2020, increasing the peak power to 28 PFlop/s, followed by a second in June 2022 for a new peak power of 36.85 PFlop/s.
Following the announcement by the French President of the Republic at Vivatech in June 2023, a final acquisition was made with the support of the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, the Direction Générale des Entreprises (French Ministry of Economics, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty) and the secrétariat général pour l'Investissement, in charge of the France 2030 plan.
Installed at IDRIS in the summer of 2024, this final extension is a Bull BullSequana XH3000 machine consisting of 1,456 NVIDIA H100 GPUs and bringing the total peak power of the Jean Zay supercomputer to 125.9 PFlop/s.
The Jean Zay 4 extension © Photothèque CNRS/Cyril Frésillon
The Man
Jean Zay around 1936 (Source: Wikipedia)
Jean Zay (1904-1944) was Minister of the National Education and Fine Arts between June 1936 and September 1939. He was assassinated on 20 June 1944 by la Milice française.
During his terms, as Minister of National Education, he implemented important changes to the French education system (compulsory sport in schools, school canteens, education in science and fine arts, school trips, etc.); as Minister of Fine Arts, he was notably responsible for the creation of the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, the Musée de l'Homme, the Musée national des Arts et Traditions Populaires and the Cannes Film Festival.
He was also responsible for the sous-secrétariat d'État à la recherche, held by Irène Joliot-Curie (June to September 1936) and then by Jean Perrin, with whom he prepared all the steps that led to the creation of the CNRS on 19 October 1939.
Jean Zay entered the Panthéon on 27 May 2015.
In 2018, it was decided to pay tribute to Jean Zay by naming the national supercomputer operated by the CNRS after him.