London, Jun 19 (IANS): Digital services provider Atos on Monday said the company has won the contract to provide one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world to the Grand équipement national de calcul intensif (GENCI), a high-performance computing agency in France, by the end of this year.

The supercomputer is a successor to the Curie system installed at the Très Grand Centre de Calcul of the CEA in Bruyères-Le-Chate (lTGCC).

"The design of Curie's successor illustrates the expertise of Atos engineers, confirming Atos' European leadership in the supercomputer domain. We are proud of the renewed trust that GENCI has placed in us," said Philippe Vannier, Group Advisor for Technology at Atos, in a statement.

Consisting of more than 124,000 computing cores, the supercomputer will benefit from the patented direct liquid cooling technology used to cool the system down to room temperature, creating an energy saving of up to 40 per cent compared to air cooling.

It can carry out nine million billion operations per second.

The new supercomputer will be made available to French and European researchers for use in academic and industrial fields that require extremely high computing and data processing power.

"GENCI welcomes the acquisition of a new Atos supercomputer, which will actively help us to maintain the scientific competitivity of our French researchers." says Philippe Lavocat, CEO of GENCI.