New collaboration involves HPE’s industry-leading, end-to-end HPC systems and SiPearl’s Rhea CPU to develop and deliver exascale-era technologies in Europe and strengthen the continent’s digital sovereignty.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) and SiPearl, the company designing a high-performance and low-power microprocessor for European exascale supercomputers, today announced a strategic partnership to jointly develop HPC solutions. The partnership, which expands heterogenous computing options for supercomputing and leverages European architectures, will support and accelerate adoption of exascale systems in Europe.

HPE and SiPearl will jointly develop an end-to-end supercomputing offering that combines HPE's supercomputing solutions designed to meet next-generation requirements in performance and scale, and SiPearl’s upcoming Rhea processor, an Arm-based CPU, targeted to power exascale performance for European systems.

The collaboration supports a larger effort and strategy set by the EuroHPC, an initiative that began in late 2018 between the EU, European countries and industry technology partners to coordinate and combine resources to develop pre-exascale and exascale supercomputers in Europe, and position the continent as a leader in supercomputing. Additionally, by adopting state-of-the-art supercomputing solutions, European organizations can fuel national open science efforts that will have a broader impact on humankind across areas such as drug discovery, climate modeling and sustainability.

“The exascale era will enable us to achieve new breakthroughs in science and engineering by taking advantage of performance and the integration of new processors. SiPearl’s technology represents a leap forward in compute performance, while increasing power efficiency, which is critical for many of our customers,” said, Justin Hotard, executive vice president and general manager, HPC & AI, HPE.

“In addition to our recent investments in a new HPC factory in Czech Republic and an AI cluster, dedicated to research, in Grenoble, France, our partnership with SiPearl is another demonstration of HPE’s ongoing commitment to support Europe’s mission to deliver world-class supercomputing that extends its sovereignty and competitiveness on the global stage.”

Accelerating Europe’s roadmap and leadership in exascale with European-based architectures

By combining SiPearl’s Rhea with HPE’s supercomputing solutions, HPE and SiPearl will deliver a broad set of advanced HPC and AI technologies, leveraging the upcoming European processor. These technologies span capabilities in high-performance networking, using HPE Slingshot, and a robust software complier and programming stack leveraging the HPE Cray Programming Environment.

The collaboration also demonstrates the increased value of developing heterogenous computing solutions, which includes a growing ecosystem of Arm-based processors, such as SiPearl’s Rhea, to provide supercomputing options that deliver improved cost and power consumption.

“We are excited about this business and technology partnership with the HPC industry leader, HPE, which has just announced plans to build its first HPC factory in Europe,” Philippe Notton, CEO and founder, SiPearl. “With the integration of our Rhea HPC microprocessor into the HPE portfolio and the creation of a joint center of excellence in Europe to enable the adoption of our combined solution by supercomputer end-users, we will drive innovation in the exascale era.”

Additionally, the partnership will deliver joint HPE and SiPearl solutions to HPE’s Center of Excellence (CoE) in Grenoble, France, which is home to France’s semiconductor research, to enable local access to users to test and optimize their products for market. The CoE staffs more than 300 engineers, and has a lab presence with specialists in areas such as energy, medicine, biotechnology, semiconductor, micro and nanotechnology, and nanoscience.

To learn more about HPE’s HPC and AI solutions, please visit: https://www.hpe.com/us/en/compute/hpc.html

To learn more about SiPearl’s European microprocessor for supercomputing, please visit: https://sipearl.com/en