Université de Reims Champagne Ardennes - URCA

University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (URCA) is a multidisciplinary university which develops innovative, fundamental and applied research within more than 30 laboratories. With 1557 teachers and teachers-researchers -including 126 hospital practitioners- as well as a technical and administrative staff of 1038, URCA provides more than 22 000 students from undergraduate to doctorate graduation in the whole region Champagne-Ardenne: Reims (main site), Troyes, Charleville-Mézières, Châlons en Champagne and Chaumont.

The university largely contributes to the development of Champagne-Ardenne through its partnerships with local and national companies and the regional authorities.URCA aims to appeal to international students and has consequently introduced the construction of an interregional and international cluster (PRES) which will include the main institutions of higher education of Champagne-Ardenne and Picardie, and Walloon universities.Situated in the heart of the Ile-de-France –at 30 minutes from Paris Center or Roissy Airport by TGV-, the Rhineland, Northern Europe and Italy, URCA occupies a geostrategic position which is favorable to European and international exchanges.The ROMEO HPC Center – Champagne Ardenne is an HPC platform hosted by the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne and supported by the Champagne-Ardenne region since 2002.Its mission is to deliver high performance computing resources for both industrial and academic researchers in the region, along with an entire ecosystem of services like secured storage space, specific software and support in its usage, as well as an in-depth expertise in different engineering fields: HPC, applied mathematics, physics, biophysics and chemistry.All these resources allow industrial and academic research teams to reduce their investments in equipment and personnel, while taking advantage of the latest technology and a support team of dedicated engineers. This represents a strong advantage in the competitive environment of today, where modeling and simulation can significantly cut costs and development times for new projects.

In 2013, ROMEO HPC Center is installing a 260 K20X cluster, in collaboration with Bull and NVIDIA. This new domain adds an important computation power on our servers and allows the tackling of new industrial challenges with an everyday impact like public transportation optimization or development of new therapeutic approaches.The ROMEO HPC Center is involved since 2011 in the French Computing strategy as a special tier-2 to tier-1 provisioning center since it is a member of the Equip@meso consortium founded by the French government (Investissements d'Avenir) and coordinated by GENCI (Organization for French High Performance Computing in public research). The scope of this project is to develop 10 medium sized HPC centers, both in terms of computing power and capacity to develop common projects with SME. As an extension, University of Reims is also a member for the European Technology platform for high performance computing (ETP4HPC).Two main concerns are central to those participations to Equip@meso and ETP4HPC, and addressed by either the joint scientific and technical collaboration with long road partners, NVIDIA and BULL, or the choice of this novel K20X technology:

• Increase the HPC hardware and software capacity of University of Reims that benefits to his users and partners in France and Europe and develop the teaching activities on accelerators technologies for HPC for both our students and SME partners
• Develop and relay in the region Champagne-Ardenne the French initiative HPC PME (HPC for SME in English) in partnership with Genci and INRIA. The main goal of this initiative is to help SME to access HPC solutions in order to enhance their competitiveness. ROMEO is the hybrid GPU technical platform that will be available for SME engaged in this initiative.

Contacts :

• ROMEO HPC Center : http://romeo.univ-reims.fr
• Michael KRAJECKI, Director : michael.krajecki@univ-reims.fr
• Arnaud RENARD, CTO : arnaud.renard@univ-reims.fr