French Atomic Energy Commission
| Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives |
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| Agency overview | |
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| Formed | October 18, 1945 |
| Preceding agency |
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| Headquarters | Paris and Gif-sur-Yvette, France |
| Employees | 15,989 (2010) |
| Annual budget | 4.7 billion € (2009) |
| Agency executives |
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| Website | www.cea.fr (in English) |
The [French] Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission or CEA (French: ), is a French public government-funded research organisation in the areas of energy, defense and security, information technologies and health technologies. The CEA maintains a cross-disciplinary culture of engineers and researchers, building on the synergies between fundamental and technological research.
CEA is headed by a board headed by the general administrator (currently Daniel Verwaerde), advised by the high-commissioner for atomic energy (currently Yves Bréchet). The missions of the CEA are equivalent to those of the United States Department of Energy. Its yearly budget amounts to 4.7 billion euros and its permanent staff is slightly under 16,000 persons. It owns Areva.
CEA was created in 1945; since then, the successive high-commissioners have been Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Francis Perrin, Jacques Yvon, Jean Teillac, Raoul Dautry, René Pellat, Bernard Bigot, and Daniel Verwaerde.
It conducts fundamental and applied research into many areas, including the design of nuclear reactors, the manufacturing of integrated circuits, the use of radionucleides for curing illnesses, seismology and tsunami propagation, the safety of computerized systems, etc.
It has one of the top 100 supercomputers in the world, the Tera-100. TERA 100, first system designed and built in Europe to reach the petaflops in 2010, was ranked in 5th position in the worldwide TOP 500. CEA is now building TERA-1000 which is a key step in the implementation of their Exascale program for the computing needs that CEA would face by 2020.
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