DDN storage being used in French Pangea supercomputer

France’s TotalEnergies is building a Pangea 5 supercomputer using Dell, Nvidia, and DDN technologies.

TotalEnergies is the rebranded French Total oil company, one of the top seven global oil suppliers. After expanding into liquefied natural gas and low-carbon energy, it renamed itself TotalEnergies in 2021, following the western world’s green shift. It has used supercomputers for classic oil industry seismic modelling since 2013 with four generations of Pangea systems;

• Pangea 1 - 2013 - 2.3 petaflops 
• Pangea 2 - 2016 - 6.7 petaflops number11 in TOP500 at the time
• Pangea 3 - 2019 - 31.7 petaflops
• Pangea 4 - 2024 - 1.6 petaflops with added Pangea@ Cloud cloud system (for burst needs) and focus on energy efficiency, making up a hybrid system

Pangea 5 will be commissioned in 2027. It represents a return to on-premises power, multiplying TotalEnergies’ compute power sixfold with, we understand, an approximate 75 petaflops rating. We're not told why TotalEnergies is abandoning the hybrid on-prem+ cloud supercomputing design of Pangea 4 and returning to big iron on-premises. 

The new system will cost more than €100 million ($117.7 million) and be sited at the Jean Féger Scientific and Technical Center (CSTJF) in Pau, in the South of France.

The intent is to expand the deployment of advanced seismic engineering and enhance subsurface imaging accuracy, likened to producing ultrasound scans of sub-surface oil-bearing rock layers. It will accelerate exploration to support low-cost and low-emission hydrocarbon production. Pangea 5 will also support R&D uses of AI, meet growing digital needs to optimize computing times, and deepen the understanding of complex phenomena like integrated power models.

TotalEnergies is pushing a green story here, saying Pangea 5 will have greater energy efficiency than previous version, having 40 percent lower energy consumption at equal performance “than previous versions.” Its cooling system's energy consumption will be cut by a factor of five. Waste heat will be recovered and used to help heat the CSTJF buildings.

Nvidia is providing GPU and InfiniBand networking hardware and software. The actual GPUs are not named. We understand Dell will provide and install the server racks, etc.  

DDN says that it’s providing the data layer for Pangea 5, “moving and managing massive, complex data sets without slowing discovery.” It's going to deliver EXAScaler, hybrid Flash and HDD for Pangea 5.