Eviden Wins €60M Finnish Supercomputing Award Amid Atos Turmoil

Eviden continues to win supercomputer contracts despite the struggles of parent company Atos, announcing a €60 million ($63 million) maximum value award for a Finnish national supercomputer that will triple the performance of the country's existing facilities.

The Atos subsidiary has been awarded the contract by the IT Center for Science (CSC), a company 70 percent owned by the Finnish state and 30 percent by higher education institutions, for a supercomputer called Roihu – which translates to "blaze" or "flare." It says the new supercomputer, as well as additional capacity for its cloud environments, amounts to a €30 million investment, with the value of the contract reaching €60 million if CSC opts into future systems and extensions.

According to Eviden, the new hardware will offer three times the compute capacity of CSC's existing systems, Mahti and Puhti, and will also significantly increase AI performance. Roihu will be located in CSC's datacenter in Kajaani, and is tipped to be ready for researchers by the end of 2025.

Stated use cases for the new equipment include analysis of audio and video recordings, AI applications across various fields, and traditional simulation-based workloads such as fluid dynamics and climate modeling.

As with other supercomputer projects the French IT services giant has built, Roihu will be based on its BullSequana XH3000 architecture. It will comprise 486 nodes, each with dual 192-core AMD "Turin" Epyc processors, for a total of 186,624 compute cores.

It will also feature 528 Nvidia GH200 GPUs in 132 nodes, along with specialized GPU nodes for visualization and nodes with extended memory, according to the CSC, all adding up to a theoretical peak compute power of 49 petaFLOPS.

Finland is also home to LUMI, formerly the fastest supercomputer in Europe and positioned eighth in the world, according to the most current TOP500 list. This latter system is overseen by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking of the European Union rather than the Finnish authorities.

"Finland has invested in its own national computing environment on a long-term basis. We need to be able to serve all researchers who need data management and computing resources," said CSC Director Pekka Lehtovuori.

"Computational grand challenges that require very large computing resources will still be solved with the pan-European EuroHPC LUMI supercomputer. Roihu's mission as a national supercomputer is to complement LUMI and to offer competitive resources to the majority of Finnish researchers."

• Nvidia's latest Blackwell boards pack 4 GPUs, 2 Grace CPUs, and suck down 5.4 kW
• LLNL's El Capitan surpasses Frontier with 1.74 exaFLOPS performance
• AMD pumps Epyc core count to 192, clocks up to 5 GHz with Turin debut
• AMD targets Nvidia H200 with 256GB MI325X AI chips, zippier MI355X due in H2 2025

Eviden's parent, Atos, has been on something of a roller coaster ride over the past few years, finding itself burdened with billions in debt and shrinking revenues from some of its business units. It has tried, and failed, to sell off parts of the company to various suitors in order to pay down some of that debt.

The company finally managed to secure funding for a restructuring and rescue deal with a group of its financial stakeholders in July. However, the French government, which has been striving to secure key company assets, including its Advanced Computing, Mission-Critical Systems, and Cybersecurity activities, may still pursue nationalizing Atos.

Earlier this month, it emerged that a French government committee was seeking a legal amendment to a 2025 finance bill that would nationalize the company, shortly after the state acquired a "preferred share" in Atos's supercomputing unit.

This hasn't stopped Eviden from picking up the supercomputer contracts, as this latest Finnish deal shows. Europe's first exascale system, Jupiter, is being built by Eviden and ParTec at the Jülich Supercomputing Center in Germany, and it delivered the EXA1 HE (High Efficiency) system to French technological research org CEA earlier this year.

Eviden is said to bring in annual revenues of around €5 billion ($5.2 billion). ®