This new supercomputer is entirely cooled by water thanks to EVIDEN patented DLC (Direct Liquid Cooling) solution, which uses lukewarm water for this purpose. With an energy efficiency indicator close to 1 (Power Usage Effectiveness), EXA1 records the best performance on the market. This feature allows the CEA/DAM to effectively control its energy consumption, reduce its operations costs and benefit from processors with the highest computing power requirements.

EXA1 is based on the second generation of BullSequana eXascale Interconnect (BXI V2).Thanks to the complete hardware offloading of the communication mechanism in the BXI V2, the use of the processor is optimized and helps to prevent compute/communication interferences. Since the communication performance of HPC applications is improved by offloading, the processors can fully concentrate on the computational tasks, while the BXI V2 handles the communications independently. To ensure high communication performance, EXA1 takes into account bandwidth, latencies and message rates.