The European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has signed a hosting agreement with GENCI – the French national agency for HPC – for its next exascale supercomputer, dubbed Alice Recoque.

The total cost of the system is €544 million (~US$582 million), with the project having been co-funded by the EuroHPC JU, with contributions from France and the Netherlands.

The system will be hosted and operated by the Jules Verne consortium and located at the TGCC computing center owned by the CEA (the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission) in Bruyères-le-Châtel, southwest of Paris.

The Jules Verne consortium will be led by France through GENCI and supported by CEA, with the participation of the Netherlands through Surf, a cooperative association of Dutch educational and research institutions.

“CEA and its teams are very proud to be the hosting site of the Alice Recoque exascale supercomputer,” said Jean-Philippe Verger, director of CEA’s Bruyères-le-Châtel site. “This is a strong recognition not only of our expertise in building major research infrastructures but also of the skills of CEA’s HPC teams all along the value chain, who will operate the machine and help the scientific communities use it.”

First announced last year, the new exascale system is named after Alice Recoque, a French computer scientist and AI pioneer who specialized in computing architectures and later worked on the design of the first mini computers.

Vendors for Alice Recoque have yet to be disclosed.

EuroHPC JU is a joint initiative between the EU, 35 European countries, and private partners to develop a supercomputing ecosystem in Europe.

Launched in 2018 and headquartered in Luxembourg, its mission is to develop, deploy, extend, and maintain a secure and connected supercomputing and quantum computing ecosystem, while supporting the development of key HPC skills for European science and industry.

Installation of the continent’s first exascale supercomputer, Jupiter, began in early 2024. Also a EuroHPC JU project, that system will be located in Forschungszentrum Jülich facilities in Germany and based on Atos Group’s Eviden BullSequana XH3000 direct liquid-cooled architecture.

Currently, the only online and benchmarked exascale supercomputer is the 1.194 Exaflops Frontier system, located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.