Teratec : le calcul haute performance

The plenary sessions on first day provided a substantial overview of User needs from all industrial sectors, as well as current state-of-the-art of Suppliers and Research.

In his introduction, Christian Saguez, President of Teratec recalled the challenges that all economic sectors will have to face in order to achieve their digital transition processing very large volumes of data (IoT, networks, Big Data...), meeting very strong growth in computing power (CPU, GPU, FPGA, QPU...), developing algorithms adapted to parallelism (Deep Learning and IA...) as well as accessibility (Cloud, Blockchain...). He also insisted on the need for a continuous R&D effort, uniting Research and Industry, and bringing players together within major national and European programs, in a collaborative approach to master co-design of technologies and applications.

He then recalled the major European initiatives and programs underway where Teratec is participating (CESIMat; SiMSEO; DataPoc; EuroHPC; Horizon 2020; ITEA; ETP4HPC; IPCEI) insisting on efforts made by Teratec to help SMEs and ETI in particular for them to take step to the digital transition. "We are also launching a number of sectoral initiatives in: Autonomous Systems; Materials and their Uses; 3D Printing; HPC/HPDA in Pre-Projects; Health and Personalized Medicine; Natural Resources.”

He also announced the forthcoming opening of a Quantum Computing Competence Centre on the Teratec Campus in Bruyères-le-Châtel (91). "It will bring together a number of industrial users (CEA; Dassault-Aviation; EDF; IFP-EN; Total), technology providers (Atos) and research centers (CERFACS; the Paris Center for Quantum Computing - PCQC; the University of Reims) to rapidly build up skills and develop appropriate know-how. This competence center will be equipped with a quantum calculator simulator installed in the Computing, Research and Technology Centre (CCRT) located at the Teratec Campus.
Another important announcement is a collaboration agreement with Genopole to facilitate the processing of the very large volumes of digital data needed for genomics, personalized medicine and biotechnology research.

The Ecole Polytechnique which hosted the event is tackling such of these challenges. This was explained by François Bouchet, Director General of the school. Hence, he highlighted the importance of high-performance computing, combining mathematics and computer science, two strong points of the school, developed in curriculum programs, but also in the fundamental research that is conducted at X. He also announced the creation of a mesocentre of computing.

Isabelle Ryl, Deputy Director General for Industrial Transfers and Partnerships, and Bruno Raffin, Research Director at INRIA, recalled the role of the national institute in computer research and technology transfers towards user companies, as well as actions and research projects in more specific fields of Digital Simulation, HPC and Cloud (CS2@Exa; FRATRES; HAC-SPeCiS; DISCOVERY; HPC-BIG Data; ELCI; Grid'5000; SILECS; EoCoe; JLESC...). They particularly insisted on the inevitable convergence taking place between HPC and IA/Big Data and dedicated research underway at INRIA.

Closer to hardware equipment, Eric Van Hensbergen, Fellow & Senior Director of HPC de arm, presented the role of his company in the development of processors and architectures adapted to HPC needs such as the Cavium Thunder X1 and X2, with noticeable participation in the Montblanc project, or its presence at the heart of the OpenHPC and Linaro HPC-SIG.

Highly appreciated, the presentation of Nicolas Vayatis, director of the CMLA and the Master MVA of the ENS Paris-Saclay, insisted on how human intelligence is designed to expand artificial intelligence. He drew an interesting parallel between B2C applications, widely used for digital marketing through the Internet, and B2B industrial applications. "The latter are generally very specific, representing quite high learning cost because of much required call on specialists’ expertise. Therefore, efforts are made to reduce such cost by replicating experiments. The challenge is to transfer all the knowledge or some parts related to different data and processes. It is therefore necessary to develop robust learning methods that sustain domain changes. The ideal is to calibrate methods with zero data. Another important point is to develop processing chains capable of adapting to the constant change in industrial data according to new products and production processes. These chains must also be able to use simulation data and combine them with real life data.”

Of course, the human factor should not be neglected in the development of these industrial AI applications. "We must not forget that these learning projects are computer projects with well-known pitfalls. Therefore, we must entrust them to IT specialists to avoid industrial disasters, while integrating experts in the field, close to the source of data, and take into account all information and remarks they will collect.”
Among the different learning methods, particularly well adapted to industrial contexts where transferring know-how of new problems on new systems is inevitable, Nicolas Vayatis believes that supervised and learning transfer will explode in the years to come. However, he believes that unsupervised and reinforced learning will remain marginal in the short term.

Finally, Cédric Villani, 2010 Fields Medal, Member of Parliament for the 5th Essonne constituency, First Vice-President of OPECST (Office parlementaire d'évaluation des choix scientifiques et technologiques) and coordinator of the parliamentary report ''Donner un sens à l'intelligence artificielle'', closed the morning by stressing that: "Science, and in particular AI, can no longer develop today without a considerable increase in the amount of computing needed, in order to support the development of intuition in most creative approaches or to avoid getting lost in absurdities.”

The afternoon resumed with a presentation by Rémi Bastien, Renault's VP Prospective Automotive, who introduced us to the major challenges facing mobility players, particularly those involved in the automobile sector with the electric vehicle; the connected vehicle; the autonomous vehicle. "This trend has become of utmost importance for traditional car manufacturers who will have to face arrivals of new players such as Tesla, but also Google or Apple. This will change the way we see the automobile to become increasingly considered as a mobility service and no longer as a good, quite integral part of energy networks and resources pool, for example storing unconsumed energies even though they are produced.”

For the autonomous vehicle, technology will be important in terms of sensors, situation recognition through AI, decision support and steering actuators managing the accelerator, brake and steering. Technologies will have to become redundant to face possible failures of any part of the system. But the key to success will be public acceptance and confidence in systems safety. This requires experimentation to measure the reliability of such autonomous systems. "While the average number of road deaths in industrialized countries today sets at 1 in 1 million driving hours on roads and 1 in 10 million driving hours on motorways, car manufacturers have set their target to 1 in 100 million driving hours for the autonomous vehicle". It will therefore be much safer.”

The connected vehicle will be both a very large producer and a very large consumer of digital data, particularly as part of the ongoing dialogue it will establish with infrastructures and other vehicles to optimize traffic safety. "This means that in the medium term the vehicle will become a system of systems, with which software will represent more than half of the value. This is why digital simulation and HPC will be essential because, as Toyota has announced, physically validating one type of autonomous vehicle will require more than 15 billion km of tests.”

Not so easy to describe the various European programs launched around HPC over the last decade. This is why Jean-Philippe Nominé, from the CEA's Strategic Analysis Department, delivered an overview of these developments to date. From Prace in 2010 to EuroHPC today, via ETP4HPC in 2012, the Rome Declaration of March 2017 truly reinforced European Commission’s strong renewed involvement from 2016.
"Today the Commission is launching the Digital Europe program, which will receive 9.2 billion€ funding over the period 2021-2027. It shows a real political will confirming the importance of these subjects. This first true European digital program will definitely help develop supercomputers, their components and software up to 2.7 B€, along with 2.5 B€ for Artificial Intelligence, 2 B€ for cyber-security, 700 M€ for training, adding 1.3 B€ to support the digital transition of administrations and companies.”

Denis Caromel, president and founder of ActiveEon, an INRIA spin-off, showed how its Workflows & Scheduler Suite run on HPC being linked to hybrid Cloud, allows very flexible processing of very large volumes of data across multiple economic sectors.
He showed how to create and validate a network of 20,000 Azure cores in less than 15 minutes, for as varied customers as CNES for satellite image analysis, Legal & General for financial risk analysis, Komatsu for the management of mining equipment via IoT, or the British Ministry of Interior for issuing visas and reducing crime, INRA in biotechnologies, and CEA-List for non-destructive evaluation of dedicated parts to the nuclear, oil and aerospace industries. "In addition to the processing level of performance, this type of solution also makes it possible to adjust the number of cores required for any given application quite highly appreciated by our customers' financial managers.”

Digital at the heart of naval systems

Often forgotten, the shipbuilding sector is a major user of Big Data, HPC and AI as well. This is what Eric Papin, Naval Group's technical, innovation and technological expertise director showed us. He explained how far digital technologies reach the heart of both military surface and submarine vessels, as well as associated means of production within shipyards through the "Digital Twin" approach.
"The complexity of our products is colossal: a submarine is made of 1 million pieces; a combat’s frigate software is more than 25 million lines of code. Digital simulation, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and HPC alike are essential means for us to design, manufacture, validate and operate ever more efficient naval systems.”

And what is true for ships is also true for operating the construction sites, because they have made their own digital revolution, using more and more 3D laser digitization comparing the "as built” to the “as design", 3D printing to produce as important parts as propellers, or virtual and augmented reality to help operators during the construction operations. "This digital approach to design and construction allows us to offer our customers specific digital twins for their warships, allowing use for crew training, predictive maintenance, remote technical support, etc. “.

Finally, Eric Selosse, VP and General Manager of Mentor's emulation division (Siemens Group), showed how specialized supercomputers as emulators can validate embedded software and hardware even before the slightest silicon is created.
"Thanks to these high-performance machines it is thus possible, for example, to include this type of electro-mechanical emulation serving as behavioral models of drivers of a vehicle, to simulate and optimize its riding mode even before producing a physical prototype. This is a new way of designing vehicles that will facilitate the exploration of innovative technical approaches at a lower cost.”

To view the presentations of the plenary sessions of the TERATEC Forum 2012

Nelson MACULAN, ancien ministre de l'Education (Brésil), professeur à l’Université fédérale de Rio-de-Janeiro
Robert MADELIN, Directeur général Société de l’information et médias de la Commission Européenne
David ROS, Vice-président, CONSEIL GENERAL DE L’ESSONNE
Philippe GILLET, Vice-président, ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE FEDERALE DE LAUSANNE
Anthony LICHNEWSKY, Software Architect- HPC Specialist, SCHLUMBERGER
Steve BARBER, Chief Executive Officer , XYRATEX
Ananth KRISHNAN, CTO, TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES
David SILAGY, Directeur de centre de recherche, ARKEMA
Joel MONNIER, Président, KALRAY
Bernard QUERLEUX, PhD, HdR , L’OREAL Recherche & Innovation

To view the presentations of the plenary sessions of the TERATEC Forum 2011

Eric BESSON, Ministre chargé de l'Industrie, de l'Énergie et de l'Économie numérique
David ROS, Vice-président du Conseil Général de l'Essonne
Rudolf HAGGENMUELLER, President d’ ITEA 2
Tadashi WATANABE, Next-Generation Supercomputer R&D Center, RIKEN (Japan)
Catharine VAN INGEN, MICROSOFT Research
Daniel ZAMPARINI, Directeur des Systèmes d'Information du Groupe PSA PEUGEOT CITROËN
Vincent GARNIER, Vice-President Research and Technology, SNECMA GROUPE SAFRAN
Daniel VANDERHAEGEN, Directeur du Département de Physique Théorique et Appliquée, CEA
François BANCILHON, CEO DATA PUBLICA
Eric JACQUET-LAGREZE, Directeur Associé et Fondateur d’EURODECISION

To view the presentations of the plenary sessions of the TERATEC Forum 2010

Christine LAGARDE, Ministre de l'Économie, de l'Industrie et de l'Emploi
Thierry MANDON, Président délégué du Conseil Général de l’Essonne
Zoran STANčIč, Directeur Général Adjoint, DG Société de l’Information et Médias, Commission Européenne
Michael STRAYER, Associate Director, DOE Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research
Earl JOSEPH, IDC Program Vice President for HPC
Leonardo Flores Añover, Commission Européenne
Jean GONNORD, Chef du projet simulation numérique et informatique du CEA
Catherine RIVIERE, PDG de GENCI
Bruno STOUFFLET, Directeur de Prospective, DASSAULT AVIATION
Pierre FIORINI, PDG de HPC PROJECT
Hervé CHARRUE, Directeur R&D de CSTB
Guillaume DEVAUCHELLE, Directeur R&D du Groupe VALEO
Jean-Charles HOURCADE, ACADEMIE DES TECHNOLOGIES

To view the presentations of the plenary sessions of the TERATEC Forum 2009

Thierry MANDON, Président délégué du Conseil général de l'Essonne
Elizabeth JASKULKE, vice‐présidente du MEDEF
Herbert CORNELIUS, Director Advanced Computing Center EMEA, INTEL
Jen-Hsun HUANG, Co-founder, President and Chief Executive Officer, NVIDIA
Alain de ROUVRAY, Président du Conseil d’Administration, ESI Group
Michel ROCHETTE, R&D Director, ANSYS
Yann BARBAUX, Head of EADS Innovation Works
James TRUCHARD, President and CEO, NATIONAL INSTRUMENTS
Pierre BEAL, Directeur Général, NUMTECH
Philippe BOUGEAULT, Directeur du Département Recherche ECMWF Météo France

For further information about the plenary sessions, please contact:

Jean-Pascal JEGU
Tél : +33 (0)9 70 65 02 10 - Mob.: +33 (0)6 11 44 49 59
jean-pascal.jegu@teratec.fr
Campus TERATEC
2, rue de la Piquetterie
91680 BRUYERES-LE-CHATEL
France

Technological challenges and diversification of big data and simulation applications