Exclusive A court case which would have seen Atos take on the UK government over a £854 million (c $1 billion) supercomputer contract for the Meteorological Office has ended before it began.

The case, Atos Services UK Ltd v Secretary of State for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy and The Meteorological Office, concerns an agreement last year between the Met Office and Microsoft to provision a new supercomputer to "take weather and climate forecasting to the next level."

The system is intended to be the world's most advanced weather and climate system, and was expected to be twice as powerful as any other supercomputer in the UK when it becomes operational in the summer.

This stemmed from a government announcement in February 2020 which committed a total £1.2 billion ($1.45 billion) for the supercomputer project, which kicked off a tender process for vendors to bid for the work.

Only two companies submitted a final tender to build the supercomputer – Atos and Microsoft. However, it emerged in February 2021 that the deal was awarded to Microsoft. Atos subsequently filed a legal challenge against the outcome, claiming the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and the Met Office had breached procurement law.

Atos had alleged there were breaches of the government's obligations under the Public Contract Regulations 2015, which led to its unfair dismissal for being "non-compliant" with the technical requirements specified in the tender. From court documents [PDF], it appears that the claims hinged on the requirements for the supply of two test supercomputers and a development supercomputer in addition to the main supercomputer system, where the test and development systems were to be "architecturally equivalent" to the main supercomputer.

BEIS and the Met Office had found the tender from Atos to be non-compliant with the stated requirements, with its tender being scored at 0/5 in each of three categories on the basis that the proposed development supercomputer system was "not architecturally equivalent to the main supercomputer system". It was claimed to have used different processors.

Atos then alleged there had been manifest errors in the evaluation of its tender and in the finding that the proposed development supercomputer was not architecturally equivalent to the main supercomputer. Furthermore, it alleged the decision had been made on the basis of "undisclosed requirements" or that BEIS and the Met Office had "interpreted the requirement of architectural equivalence in a way which would not be transparent" to Atos.

It was also alleged that BEIS and the Met Office had acted in a disproportionate manner in simply ruling that the tender was non-compliant without seeking further clarification on the architectural equivalence aspect from Atos.

According to a report in the Financial Times, Atos claimed "the Met Office has chosen a final tender which scored lower in quality, transferred more commercial risk to the Met Office and is more expensive," and that it had been "unlawfully deprived of the contract award, despite having the most economically advantageous tender."

For its part, the government denied liability, stating that the requirement of architectural equivalence was interpreted correctly, and the Atos tender was scored correctly because the proposed development supercomputer lacked the required architectural equivalence.

The case was due to come to court on May 9 for what was expected to be a nine-day trial, whereby the court would have had to determine the correct interpretation of the concept of architectural equivalence in the context of the invitation to participate (ITP) and the tender process as a whole.

However, the case was settled out of court, the parties confirmed to The Register. The terms of the settlement are not being disclosed.

A spokesperson for BEIS sent us a statement: "The proceedings regarding supercomputer procurement have been resolved with no admission of liability from any party.

"The agreement allows the Met Office to concentrate efforts on delivering the infrastructure necessary to keep the UK at the forefront of global weather and climate science leadership."

Atos told us: "We are pleased to have resolved this matter."

The Met Office's legacy supercomputing resources comprise three Cray XC40 systems, with two dedicated largely to forecasting while the third is used as a research system.

According to a report in HPCwire, the replacement supercomputing system from Microsoft will comprise four Azure-integrated HPE Cray EX supercomputers based on AMD "Milan" Epyc processors, with an active archive system capable of storing nearly four exabytes of data. ®

HPE has scored another supercomputing win with the inauguration of the LUMI system at the IT Center for Science, Finland, which as of this month is ranked as Europe's most powerful supercomputer.

Analysis In a sign of how meteoric AMD's resurgence in high performance computing has become, the latest list of the world's 500 fastest publicly known supercomputers shows the chip designer has become a darling among organizations deploying x86-based HPC clusters.

The most eye-catching bit of AMD news among the supercomputing set is that the announcement of the Frontier supercomputer at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which displaced Japan's Arm-based Fugaku cluster for the No. 1 spot on the Top500 list of the world's most-powerful publicly known systems.

Top500 updates its list twice a year and published its most recent update on Monday.

After taking serious CPU market share from Intel over the last few years, AMD has revealed larger ambitions in AI, datacenters and other areas with an expanded roadmap of CPUs, GPUs and other kinds of chips for the near future.

These ambitions were laid out at AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2022 event on Thursday, where it signaled intentions to become a tougher competitor for Intel, Nvidia and other chip companies with a renewed focus on building better and faster chips for servers and other devices, becoming a bigger player in AI, enabling applications with improved software, and making more custom silicon.  

"These are where we think we can win in terms of differentiation," AMD CEO Lisa Su said in opening remarks at the event. "It's about compute technology leadership. It's about expanding datacenter leadership. It's about expanding our AI footprint. It's expanding our software capability. And then it's really bringing together a broader custom solutions effort because we think this is a growth area going forward."

Analysis After re-establishing itself in the datacenter over the past few years, AMD is now hoping to become a big player in the AI compute space with an expanded portfolio of chips that cover everything from the edge to the cloud.

It's quite an ambitious goal, given Nvidia's dominance in the space with its GPUs and the CUDA programming model, plus the increasing competition from Intel and several other companies.

But as executives laid out during AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2022 event last week, the resurgent chip designer believes it has the right silicon and software coming into place to pursue the wider AI space.

Lenovo has inked an agreement with Spain's Barcelona Supercomputing Center for research and development work in various areas of supercomputer technology.

The move will see Lenovo invest $7 million over three years into priority sectors in high-performance computing (HPC) for Spain and the EU.

The agreement was signed this week at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-National Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS), and will see Lenovo and the BSC-CNS try to advance the use of supercomputers in precision medicine, the design and development of open-source European chips, and developing more sustainable supercomputers and datacenters.

French IT services provider Atos has confirmed the departure of its chief financial officer, just days after the CEO resigned in apparent disagreement with a company-wide restructure proposed by the board.

Atos disclosed over the weekend that its current CFO Stéphane Lhopiteau will leave the group during the second half of this year and will be succeeded in the post by Nathalie Sénéchault, currently the deputy CFO of the company.

According to Atos, the planned separation, announced at a Capital Markets Day on June 14, is part of an "ambitious turnaround" effort intended to result in a complete reorganization of the group into two separately listed companies. The departure of Lhopiteau will come during the second half of 2022, by which time the separation is expected to be well underway, Atos said.

Atos's share price tumbled this morning on confirmation it is exploring a two-way split of operations, a decision that made the position of recently installed CEO Rodolphe Belmer untenable.

In early morning trades on the Paris stock exchange, Atos stock plunged 27 percent, the steepest fall on record, after it outlined a blueprint to progress the business – one that clearly didn't have CEO backing.

The proposal "following preliminary strategic review work" is to spin out the Digital, Big Data, and Security businesses into a separately traded entity called Evidian, also listed on the Paris exchange. These units turned over $5.12 billion (€4.9 billion) in sales during 2021 and are the growing parts of Atos. It would be run by Philippe Oliva and employ 59,000 people.

A drought of AMD's latest Threadripper workstation processors is finally coming to an end for PC makers who faced shortages earlier this year all while Hong Kong giant Lenovo enjoyed an exclusive supply of the chips.

AMD announced on Monday it will expand availability of its Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000 CPUs to "leading" system integrators in July and to DIY builders through retailers later this year. This announcement came nearly two weeks after Dell announced it would release a workstation with Threadripper Pro 5000 in the summer.

The coming wave of Threadripper Pro 5000 workstations will mark an end to the exclusivity window Lenovo had with the high-performance chips since they launched in April.

The land of the rising sun has fallen to the United States’ supercomputing might. Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) newly minted Frontier supercomputer has ousted Japan’s Arm-based Fugaku for the top spot on the Top500 rankings of the world's most-powerful publicly known systems.

Frontier’s lead over Japan’s A64X-based Fujitsu machine is by no means a narrow one either. The cluster achieved peak performance of 1.1 exaflops according to the Linpack benchmark, which has been the standard by which supercomputers have been ranked since the mid-1990s.

Frontier marks the first publicly benchmarked exascale computer by quite a margin. The ORNL system is well ahead of Fugaku’s 442 petaflops of performance, which was a strong enough showing to keep Fugaku in the top spot for two years.

Amid the renewed interest in Arm-based servers, it is easy to forget that one company with experience in building server platforms actually brought to market its own Arm-based processor before apparently losing interest: AMD.

Now it has emerged that Jim Keller, a key architect who worked on Arm development at AMD, reckons the chipmaker was wrong to halt the project after he left the company in 2016.

Keller was speaking at an event in April, and gave a talk on the "Future of Compute", but the remarks were unreported until picked up by WCCF TECH.

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