- The most efficient supercomputer in the world, with proven efficiency of almost 84% according to the LINPACK benchmark[1]
- European Number One, with a performance of 1.05 Petaflops[2]
- A general-purpose supercomputer, designed to run the CEA-DAM’s Simulation program 24 hours a day
Tera 100 has officially broken the Petaflops barrier, by recording a performance of 1.05 million billion operations a second (1.05 Petaflops) in the LINPACK benchmark test, for a peak performance[3] of 1.25 Petaflops. This performance means it ranks as the most powerful supercomputer in Europe, and it ranks one of the very best in the world, in the TOP 500 listing published mid-November 2010. Its 83.7% efficiency rating, the highest among all the supercomputers in its class, and its performance clearly demonstrate the quality of the design work carried out by the teams from Bull and CEA-DAM (the Military Applications Division of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission).
Tera 100 is a cluster of 4,370 bullx S series servers, equipped with 17,480 Intel® Xeon® 7500 processors. Its central memory features over 140,000 memory modules, delivering a total capacity of 300 TB. It features some 20 petabytes (PB) of disc capacity, accessible at a world record speed of 500 GB/sec.
A general-purpose supercomputer designed for round-the-clock production
The result of a close partnership between Bull and CEA-DAM, Tera 100 is used to support the Simulation program at the Military Applications Division (DAM).
As a general-purpose production supercomputer, Tera 100 has been designed to run the widest possible range of computer simulation applications, so it is quite different from other machines dedicated to running specific applications. It also stands out as a result of its high levels of availability and reliability, which enables it to be fully operational virtually 24 hours a day.
“This latest benchmarking of Tera 100 reaffirms Bull’s position as the European leader in computer simulation technologies,” commented Philippe Miltin, Vice President, Bull Products and Systems. “Tera 100 leverages on Bull’s expertise in the design, integration and implemention of supercomputers for production, and is based on Open Source technologies and standard Intel® Xeon® processors. And using these same open, high-performance and competitive technologies enables Bull to meet even the most demanding requirements of industry and research, for example in healthcare, sustainable development and homeland security.”
“Tera 100’s proven performance clearly demonstrates the quality of the partnership between the CEA-DAM’s teams and those from Bull in technologies that are vital both to State sovereignty and corporate competitiveness,” said Jean Gonnord, Director for Numerical Simulation & Computer Sciences at CEA/DAM. “This opens up the way for even more powerful systems, and for even greater co-operation in the design and development of the next generation of European computers; the Exa-scale systems that are expected to appear before 2020.”
The latest TOP 500 ranking is published at www.top500.org.
For more information >>> http://www.bull.com/extreme-computing/index.html
[1] The LINPACK benchmark is the official test used for the Top 500 supercomputer ranking.
[2] Petaflops (peta floating point operations) = one million billion operations a second.
[3] Performance measured by reference codes like the Linpack benchmark shows actual compute performance (sustained performance). Peak performance is the theoretical maximal performance of all processors. In the TOP500 ranking, those performances are noted respectively Rmax et Rpeak.
