Missions and objectives

Created in 1993, IDRIS (Institute for Development and Resources in Intensive Scientific computing) is CNRS's national supercomputing center.

Together with others national supercomputing centers, IDRIS integrates the high end national supercomputing infrastructures which provide CNRS and Universities research laboratories the ultimate high performance computing resources and services they may need.

In order to cope with the most demanding high performance computing requirements of the French scientific community, IDRIS, CCRT CINES and TGCC deploy advanced supercomputing environments, and assist scientists through their highly efficient Users Support teams.

IDRIS is both a national server for very high performance computing, and a center of excellence in information technologies applied to computational science. It is a Service Unit fully funded by CNRS, with an interdisciplinary scope, and attached to the "Institut for Information Sciences and Technologies" CNRS institute (INS2I). IDRIS is structured in close analogy with units that work as Large Scientific Instruments, and reports to an Administration Council.

IDRIS missions

IDRIS participates to the acceleration of scientific discover by the use of information technologies, and provides support to research projects that need access to high performance computing resources. As a service unit, the fundamental criterion of excellence of its action, is the quality of the science enabled by its environment and its services.

To fulfill his missions, IDRIS acts in two different directions :

As a service unit, by the deployment and management of a fast changing, heterogeneous, high performance supercomputing environment, adapted to the most demanding needs of computational science. This includes important user support teams who provide a large number of value added services to end users, including assistance with the environment, training, code development and optimisation.
As a agent for technology's transfer, from research and development in information technologies to the national HPC infrastructures. Acting both in the computational science and information technologies areas, IDRIS has a privileged position to gradually integrate new emerging enabling technologies in the national HPC infrastructures. In this way, IDRIS acted efficiently in the 90's, in the diffusion of massive parallel processing. Today, IDRIS is implementing a strong leadership on an European scale in the field of Computational Grids.

IDRIS is permanent supervising and assessing all evolutions in advanced information technologies relevant to computational science : code optimisation on vector or scalar parallel machines, high level visualisation, Unix systems, LINUX, storage and data management, data mining, middlewares, ...)

Missions and objectives

IDRIS missions

© CNRS - IDRIS, 23/04/2012