TERATEC award, innovation category
27 June 2022
The TERATEC 2022 Simulation and Digital Technologies Trophy, innovation category, was awarded to Catherine Lambert on June 14 during the TERATEC 2022 Forum. This trophy rewards CERFACS and Safran for the development of the AVIP code capable of simulating new generations of electric motors for satellite propulsion. Thanks to the use of unstructured meshes and innovative numerical techniques, AVIP makes it possible to build digital twins of real engines. Congratulations to all who contributed to the project: Willca Villafana (Cerfacs), Guillaume Bogoposlky (Safran), Benjamin Laurent (Safran), Olivier Vermorel (Cerfacs), Bénédicte Cuenot (Cerfacs) And a big thank you to our partners: INRIA and Ecole Polytechnique (POSEIDON project)
Catherine Lambert awarded Officer in the national order of Merit
31 May 2022
Catherine LAMBERT, President of Cerfacs, has been promoted to the grade of officer in the national order of Merit, on the proposal of Mrs. Frédérique Vidal, Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation. Antoine PETIT, President and CEO of the CNRS, presented the insignia to Catherine LAMBERT during a ceremony that brought together many actors from the space, aeronautics, environment and digital sectors. Antoine PETIT: "Catherine's interpersonal skills, her ability to step back and understand very different environments (research, industry, politics) in order to develop a collective vision are the hallmarks of her career. Catherine is one of those people with whom you naturally feel confident, with whom you want to build something that goes beyond all of us to go further. With this honor, the Cerfacs teams are also rewarded.
Sparse Days in Saint-Girons IV
29 March 2022
Sparse Days Meeting 2022 🗓️ 20-22 June 2022 @ Saint-Girons, France 🌐 Sparse Days 2022 will be held in Saint-Girons, Ariège, from 20-22 June. This enhanced version of Sparse Days is being co-organized by Cerfacs and ENSEEIHT/IRIT. It will be the fourth meeting in Saint- Girons following the tradition of the previous meetings held in 1994, 2003, and 2015. The tradition involves coupling our highly successful annual technical meeting with the ambience and hospitality of this wonderful Pyrenean town which encourages fruitful informal exchanges between participants.
Press releases on the NextSim EuroHPC project
9 February 2022
Press talks about the NextSim EuroHPC project. CERFACS is involved in two major points. The first topic is to extend the numerical capabilities of the code to perform scale-resolving simulations of jet noise configurations on exascale supercomputers. The second focus is to exploit data from these simulations by extracting or visualising relevant physical information during the computation. CERFACS is involved in the NextSim project (). The primary objective is to increase the capabilities of Computational Fluid Dynamics tools on extreme-scale parallel computing platforms for aeronautical design. This project has received funding from the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement N° 956104. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and Spain, France, Germany. This project has received funding from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) under grant agreement N° ANR-20-EHPC-0002-02. For more information, please visit
Two new partitions bring the peak power of the Cerfacs computer to 1 Pflop/s.
1 February 2022
A hybrid partition composed of 8 quadri-GPU Nvidia A30 nodes and a computational partition comprising 40 IceLake nodes were put into production in early January. These two new partitions strengthen our simulation and research capabilities by increasing the peak performance of the Cerfacs Lenovo computer to 1 Pflop/s.
Pr Roland Glowinski, former director of CERFACS, dies at 84
28 January 2022
We are very sad to announce that Roland Glowinski has died on January 26th. Pr Glowinski was CERFACS director from 1992 to 1995 and has strongly contributed to the evolution of the laboratory. He was a professor émérite at université Pierre et Marie Curie, part time professor at City U, Hong Kong, professor at University of Houston, member of the french Academy of Sciences.
EDF P. Caseau prize awarded to CERFACS PhD on combustion instabilities: C. Laurent
27 January 2022
Charlélie Laurent has received the 2021 EDF Paul Caseau prize for his work on combustion instabilities in rocket engines. This prestigious prize is awarded by the Fondation del Duca and supported by EDF, the Institute of France, the Academy of Sciences. C. Laurent graduated from Ecole Normale de Cachan and is now a post doctoral student at Stanford University.
Final movie of the Large Eddy Simulation of a full engine and links of the publications.
26 January 2022
Within the PRACE project FULLEST (First fUlL engine computation with Large Eddy SimulaTion), a joint collaboration between CERFACS, SAFRAN and AKIRA technologies, two joint papers got recently published in open access in the Journal of Global Power Propulsion Society. We acknowledge PRACE for awarding us access to Joliot-Curie (Genci) hosted at CEA/TGCC, FRANCE, Safran Tech and DGAC fundings within the project ATOM, along with the invaluable technical support at CERFACS: Dr. G. Staffelbach, Dr. F. Duchaine, Dr. L. Gicquel, Dr. N. Odier and M. B. Martin. Akira Tech: Dr. T. Quirante and N. Vieira-Nobre. @Safran Helicopter Engines: Dr. S. Richard , Dr. N. Buffaz and Dr G. Exilard. It also benefited from developments done in projects EXCELLERAT (H2020 823691) and EPEEC (H2020 801051).
Video presentation of the NextSim EuroHPC project
14 December 2021
The video presentation of the NextSim project has just been released : CERFACS is involved in the NextSim project (). The primary objective is to increase the capabilities of Computational Fluid Dynamics tools on extreme-scale parallel computing platforms for aeronautical design. This project has received funding from the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement N° 956104. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and Spain, France, Germany. This project has received funding from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) under grant agreement N° ANR-20-EHPC-0002-02. For more information, please visit
Thierry Poinsot officially entered the French Academy of Sciences
8 November 2021
Thierry Poinsot officially entered the French Academy of Sciences on October 12. See presentation here :
The AVBP code from CERFACS at the heart of for PRACE projects from the 23rd call
30 September 2021
Cerfacs is involved in three PRACE projects of the 23rd call for which hour allocation runs from 01/10/2021 to 30/09/2022. Researchers from ECL/LMFA UMR5509 (Ecole Centrale de Lyon) and IMFT (UMR 5502) laboratories have earned projects entirely based on the use of the LES solver developed by Cerfacs AVBP and involve the support of experts from the CFD and COOP teams underling the importance and effectiveness of collaborations between French labs and Cerfacs. Alexis Giauque from ECL/LMFA UMR5509 (Ecole Centrale de Lyon) has obtained not only one but two PRACE projects! The first project LESFAN (RA0101, 30 000 000 CPU hours on Irene/Rome TGCC) is based on the use of AVBP in the turbomachinery version to study the generation of noise by a fan of a real airplane engine. The second, PRACE-EDGES (RA0101, 40 000 000 CPU hours on Irene/Rome TGCC) focuses on LES modeling of dens gas in complex geometries. To do so, the LMFA Team has developed advanced thermodynamic closures in AVBP allowing the direct simulation of such flows. Laurent Selle from IMFT (UMR 5502) has received CPU hours for the GASTON project (RA0061, 30 000 000 CPU hours on Marenostrum BSC) which aims to study the structure of hydrogen flames in porous materials. For this, IMFT and Cerfacs will perform coupled simulations considering the reactive flow with AVBP as well as the conduction in the porous medium with AVTP which is known to play an central role in the flame stabilization process. Carlos Perez Arroyo from IMFT (UMR 5502) received 16 Mh CPU hours on Joliot-Curie Skylake partition to support his project WONDER.
