Atos recorded the strongest rise on the SBF 120 index on Tuesday at the Paris Stock Exchange, after its subsidiary Eviden was selected, alongside American company AMD, to deliver a next-generation supercomputer as part of a research project led by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA).
This supercomputer, named "Alice Recoque" in tribute to the French computer scientist who passed away in 2021, is designed for scientific computing and artificial intelligence. It boasts a computing power exceeding one exaflop per second, equivalent to a billion billion calculations per second.
Such performance matches what humanity could achieve in four years of nonstop mental arithmetic, or the power of 10 million desktop computers.
Powered by AMD's HPC-AI computing technologies, the project has a total estimated cost of EUR554 million over its five-year operational period.
The system will be installed at the CEA's Très Grand Centre de Calcul (TGCC) in Bruyères-le-Châtel (Essonne), which already hosts other Eviden systems such as the Joliot-Curie and Topaze machines.
Specifically, the supercomputer will comprise 94 racks, 280 km of cabling, and weigh 280 tonnes—the equivalent of 28 city buses—spread across 174 square meters. Its energy consumption is expected to be 20% lower than that of equivalent 'exascale' systems, thanks to more efficient applications.
On the Paris Stock Exchange, Atos shares were up 1.5% by 3:45 p.m. on Tuesday, after surging 4.7% following the official announcement of the contract.
