Major boost on the HPC market for Qarnot

Qarnot accelerates in the field of high-performance computing. New clients on the one hand, significant expansion of the infrastructure on the other: Qarnot now has the means to become the first European green computing player. Rendering of the Minions 2 for Illumination, installation of 20,000 additional computing cores: the end of 2020 heralds a year of strong growth and challenges for Qarnot in 2021.

A new warehouse, 7,000 more available cores
Qarnot boots the development of its infrastructure. As part of ScaleMax, the joint venture created with Groupe Casino, a new warehouse has been equipped with 7,000 cores near Saint-Etienne (South East of France). The Ryzen and Ryzen Threadripper processors are provided by our technological partner, AMD. “We're thrilled to team with Qarnot to enable projects with our latest processor technology, designed to meet the most demanding needs with more core throughput, larger caches, and powerful multi-threading capabilities, pushing the boundaries to deliver on the promise of next generation high performance computing” states Roger Benson, Senior Director, Commercial EMEA at AMD. After its latest successful fundraising in March, Qarnot has hired 15 people since the first lockdown. This additional staffing is already beginning to show results: the infrastructure grows as the number of orders is increasing.

Taking up a major technical challenge: rendering of the Minions 2
Illumination, subsidiary of Universal Pictures International, has chosen Qarnot to render the worldwide famous feature Minions 2: The rise of Gru. The Qarnot teams took up a major technical challenge for this very first cooperation, as they installed more than 15,000 cores in 3 weeks. During Four months of intensive computing, Qarnot rendered images of this much-awaited 2nd opus of the saga (6.6 million theatre admissions in France for the 1st one). Qarnot has been a major player in high performance computing for the past ten years and has set its reputation in the banking and 3D animation sectors among others. This expertise is required by the clients, as explained by Bruno Mahé, Head of Technology at Illumination: “We have been seduced by the reactivity and expertise of Qarnot which enabled us to use our renderer on more than 15,000 cores during 4 months”.

New sectors and scalability of the distribution platform
R&D has been embedded in Qarnot’s DNA since its creation ten years ago and remains the key stone of the company.
One of the major current projects is the scalability of the Q·Ware, the platform that distributes the computation: the goal is to be able to serve a growing number of clients on a larger grid, with the same high-level security and efficiency standards that we currently have. A new team of 5 engineers has been created with a mission to broaden Qarnot’s activities and make its added-value available for new sectors: artificial intelligence, machine learning, medical research, molecular docking, weather forecast, fluids dynamics….
Besides, Qarnot has managed to both strengthen its commercial relationships with existing clients like BNP Paribas for the past 5 years and build new ones with Natixis or Société Générale for instance, which have entrusted their risk analysis computation to Qarnot.

« 2021, a promising year »
Paul Benoit, co-founder and President of Qarnot, states: « We have been proving for several years now that technical and environmental requirements can go hand in hand. We prove that it works and reap the benefits: the demand is significantly rising, with several prestigious clients who joined us recently. We constantly need to balance supply and demand, which explains why we keep on increasing the number of available cores in the IT infrastructure. »

Paul Benoit also adds: « We ask a lot to the teams and they take up the challenges with utmost professionalism. We are growing but we remain very much focused on the quality of the services provided to the clients: security, reliability, suitability for their needs, availability of the teams… We know how to make a difference on this very competitive market! 2021 looks very good, we are ahead of a very promising year! »

The current development in France is the promise of a few years of intense growth for Qarnot. The company also builds an export strategy and has already targeted Northern Europe and Germany where high-end technology, environmental solutions and innovation are major concerns for the economic recovery.

Qarnot computing
40-42 rue Barbès
92120 - Montrouge, France
https://computing.qarnot.com/en

Contact : Quentin Laurens - quentin@qarnot.com - +33 (0)7 61 83 82 61

Founded in 2010 by Paul Benoit et Miroslav Sviezeny, Qarnot Computing develops the Q.Ware, a PaaS that is dedicated to cloud computing which gives access to an ecological and economical HPC infrastructure whatever the computation needs (AI, ML, Big Data, Simulation, 3D rendering...) or market (finance, insurance, biotechnologies, retail, industry, animation or VFX studio...).
Qarnot rethinks data centers by breaking up collections of servers and spreading them into buildings (homes, offices, schools, logistics warehouses...) in the form of computing heaters and boilers embedding high performance processors and free-cooling computing clusters.
Computation is distributed thanks to the Q.Ware which takes advantage of the container technology. The waste heat is reused instantly thanks to the disruptive platform that dispatches automatically the computation where heat (of air or water) is needed. By avoiding data center costs related to infrastructure, maintenance, and cooling, Qarnot offers affordable HPC.
In 2020, Qarnot became a member of Teratec, France Data Center, Tech for Good and has been labelled “Best Places To Work” France 2021.

This release was published on openPR.