EDF R&D Next-gen elastic HPC Clusters on AWS

EDF R&D

HPC Industry & Services

Publié le 09 décembre 2025

The context

EDF R&D runs a substantial number of numerical simulations and maintains a variety of on-premises High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructures, including Slurm clusters such as CRONOS and GAIA. GAIA was scheduled to be decommissioned and replaced by a next generation HPC cluster, SELENA, by the end of 2025. In the meantime, EDF R&D had an estimated gap of 100 million core-hours in computing capacity for the next year.

Aneo built for EDF R&D an elastic HPC computing solution on AWS to address, on a project-by-project basis, manual overflow needs for providing additional computing resources and meet resilience challenges in case of internal outages. In addition, EDF R&D also aimed to equip its researchers with advanced, on-demand state-of-the-art computing resources like the latest GPUs, and port EDF’s flagship CFD to be able to exploit them.

Challenge

Maintain a consistent user experience while allowing EDF to go beyond the traditional static HPC cluster setups.
Provide flexible HPC deployments while keeping with EDF’s strict security requirements in terms of user access and data management.
Accompany researchers in their discovery of what the new platform could do for them.
Technical complexity of adding to EDF’s flagship CFD code Nvidia GPU support.

Impact

Possibility to deploy specialized, targeted and possibly ephemeral HPC Clusters on a project-by-project basis or other relevant criteria.
Ability to expand EDF R&D HPC capacity to absorb the charge of traditional busy periods at the middle and end of the year.
A platform that can be RUN by less than one FTE year-round without any impact in up-time or support quality.
The ability to take advantage of on-demand access to GPUs and other state-of-the-art computing and run their most used CFD code on them with significant performance gains.

In the spotlight

AI-powered Climate Scenarios and Forecasts

01 April 2025 Artificial intelligence

Industry & Services

In an era where climate change is reshaping industries and global policies, accurate and scalable climate forecasting is more crucial than ever.

cas client - migration-symphony-to-armonik-gmd-journey

Migration from Symphony to ArmoniK: GMD's Journey

17 September 2024 ArmoniK

Banking & Financial Services

GMD (Global Markets Division) at Crédit Agricole Corporate and Investment Bank (CA-CIB) relied heavily on IBM Symphony for their grid computing needs.

cas client - migration-datasynapse-to-armonik-equity-journey

Migration from DataSynapse to ArmoniK: Equity IT's Journey

17 September 2024 ArmoniK

Banking & Financial Services

Equity IT at Crédit Agricole Corporate and Investment Bank (CA-CIB) faced significant challenges with their existing grid computing infrastructure, which relied on TibCo DataSynapse.

EDF R&D Next-gen elastic HPC Clusters on AWS

The context

Challenge

Impact

In the spotlight

Newsletter