France’s most powerful supercomputer for research had to be unplugged

The Jean-Zay supercomputer, one of the three national infrastructures for high-performance scientific computing, took the scientific community by surprise when it was partially shut down on 5 February during an attempt to increase the machine’s capabilities. 

The Jean-Zay supercomputer is operated by the Institute for Development and Resources in Scientific Computing (CNRS), on the Paris-Saclay campus in Orsay.

Jean Zay was extended in the summer of 2020 to be capable of running 28 petaflops, which is 28 million billion operations per second, which was a new record set by the supercomputer.

Whether they are combating Covid-19, researching climate or astrophysics, or developing artificial intelligence, the Jean Zay supercomputer, provided France’s scientific community with increasingly extensive computational capabilities.

It was developed by HPE and is operated by the CNRS Institut du Développement et des Ressources en Informatique Scientifique (IDRIS). Jean Zay’s power would put it 10th in the last ranking of the world’s top 500 supercomputers.