Decommissioning Pangea - a major technical project

Since 2013, when the first Pangea supercomputer arrived at the CSTJF in Pau, its name has been, and still is, associated with innovation and high performance at TotalEnergies. The Company invested in supercomputing in the 1980s, to improve and make research easier for engineers. The massive quantities of data collected, and the algorithms developed to give them meaning, soon required high-performance computing and the use of highly-powerful supercomputers. And ones that are constantly being developed...

Initially considered as an extension of the first machine, Pangea 2 became an autonomous computer when Pangea 1 was demobilized in 2020. Based on CPU Intel technology, it hosted - until 2024 and the arrival of Pangea4 et Pangea@Cloud seismic imaging and reservoir simulation calculations for the multi-energy Company. In terms of performance, Pangea 4 is twice as fast as Pangea 2 when it comes to computing.

Successful decommissioning and an exemplary project

Thanks to the meticulous preparation upstream of the project by the Platforms for Scientific Computing staff, the implementation of the decommissioning process freed-up resources while guaranteeing the continuity of operations and paving the way for future technological projects. "Although we had already been through one decommissioning process in 2020, it’s always a sizable event in technical and HSE terms. The project required careful planning with a series of specific steps and the interventions were executed by trained, qualified and competent staff. The obsolete hardware is destined to be recycled and reused." explains Alexandre Pattyn, Demobilization project lead.

• 73 racks
• 4,608 computing nodes
• 1 ton of ethernet network cables
• 50 tons of hardware
• 5,972 storage drives

Figures that make your head spin…

Several operators in co-activity such as Autaa and Dalkia participated in the dismantling and evacuation of the hardware in total safety alongside the teams from the Pau Site. The next step is to recycle and reuse everything that can be, through Hewlett Packard Enterprise - HPE, specialized in the restoration and repair of corporate technological hardware, and in environmentally-friendly recycling processes, according to the strictest standards.