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On the 23rd of June 2022 a high-level event jointly organised by the French Embassy and Atos, an international digital services company, took place. The event, “French-Korean Conference: Empowering the NextGen High-Performance Computing through Scientific and Industry Collaborations,” brought together key players and trailblazers from both Korea and France in the field of high-performance computing. They discussed synergies between France and Korea that could be leveraged to accelerate each other’s journey towards the next generation of supercomputers, the Exascale.

They also agreed that such initiatives should focus on three main aspects: strengthening scientific cooperation between France and Korea in High-Performance Computing (HPC), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Quantum Computing, potentially capitalising on France’s pivotal role within the EuroHPC Joint undertaking, developing fully hybrid architectures and finally enhancing training and education for users of these very complex systems.

During this event, the First Counsellor of the French Embassy in Korea opened the seminar by highlighting Europe and France’s strategy in the field of high-performance computing and quantum emulator. At least two exascale systems will be set up in Europe in the coming years and France is willing to host one. France has a comprehensive strategy for quantum technologies, which will be fuelled by €1.8 billion until 2025 to ascertain scientific and industrial leadership, support an attractive ecosystem and startups and train talents.

Laurent Crouzet, Head of Digital Services and Infrastructures at the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, shared his views on how the European HPC experience and cooperation are paving the way towars larger HPC infrastructures like exascale. Professor LEE Jaejin, Vice Dean at the Seoul National University Graduate School of Data Science, explained to the audience how hybridisation of HPC with quantum simulation is widely used in Deep Learning.

Cécile Vigouroux, Head of International Relations at the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (INRIA), said: “INRIA collaborates internationally with a limited number of strategic partners, including Korea. INRIA has signed framework agreements with KAIST in 2020 to promote joint research projects and exchanges of doctoral students, and with ETRI in 2021, particularly in the areas of AI, IoT and 5G. The institute also wishes to strengthen its existing collaboration with KISTI.”

The keynote speeches were followed by a rich panel discussion involving representatives: Dr Sik Lee of KISTI (Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information), Dr Andreas Heinrich of IBS (Institute for Basic Science), Dr Louis Priaux of CEA Tech (the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission’s Technological Research Division) and Dr Lee Sang-san of Handong University.

Korea has been focusing until recently on the optimal utilisation of HPC resources, which has helped its scientific institutes achieve top standing within the worldwide HPC community. Korea is now aiming at developing its very own ecosystem of industrial players in both HPC and Quantum Computing, objectives for which it can certainly leverage its strong expertise and industrial base in both electronics and software development. It also wants to accelerate its journey towards exascale to get into the top 10 HPC installations worldwide.

In a world where data is explosively growing, the European Union through the EuroHPC undertaking is at the forefront of the development of this technology. This is made possible thanks to Research Institutes like INRIA and also Julich, BSC or the CEA, which use or will soon use Atos’s BullSequana X supercomputer. Indeed, Atos places co-design at the core of its collaboration with European players – an approach that it has already successfully deployed in other markets in Asia or South America and would like to promote in Korea in the years to come.

Combining optimal performance and effective energy consumption, Atos’s next-gen hybrid and AI-augmented supercomputer, the BullSequana XH3000, with its 4th gen DLC (Direct Liquid Cooling), empowers unprecedented performance for any scale to Exascale performance with unrivalled global system efficiency.

Finally, the panellists also concurred on the necessity to reduce the carbon footprint of HPC in response to the closing remarks of Dr Cedric Bourrasset, Global Head of High-Performance AI Computing at Atos: “We are supporting our customers to reduce their HPC carbon footprint by optimising applications and time to solution within the same compute power envelope.”

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