Early Summer 2011 was a busy time for Bull, with some significant milestones in HPC. In June, the TOP500 rankings – published at ISC 2011 – once again awarded the title of ‘Europe’s most powerful supercomputer’ to Tera 100. Having already been named as number one in Europe in the previous listing published in the USA, in November 2010, this confirms the leadership position enjoyed by Tera 100’s technology – developed by Bull along with the teams from CEA-DAM (the Military Applications Directorate of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission) – in an ultra-competitive marketplace.
A distillation of innovative technologies
Designed for round-the-clock operation, Tera 100 is a true production system dedicated to delivering processing power and scientific computing capability. Tera 100 is a distillation of innovation technologies, whose main aim is to effectively combine performance and maximum efficiency. Tera 100 runs at 83.7% efficiency, making it one of the world’s most efficient supercomputers and clearly illustrating the quality of its design and the work carried out by the teams from Bull and CA-DAM.
The technologies developed for Tera 100 being integrated into Bull’s bullx range, research and industry can therefore benefit from them, like University of Aachen which acquired from Bull their new supercomputer. With a performance of 220 Teraflops (Linpack), it is ranked 32nd in the world, and is among the five most powerful supercomputers in Germany. Currently being installed, two petaflops-scale supercomputers, the CURIE – system developed for scientific research with GENCI, and the F4E system at Rokkasho (Japan) dedicated to the ITER fusion project, also rely on these technologies.
Bull’s Extreme Computing users join forces and create BUX
Also at ISC 2011, Bull announced the creation of BUX, the Bull User group for Extreme Computing. BUX is an independent worldwide group of users that will cooperate to increase the capabilities of the large-scale, parallel scientific and technical computing solutions supplied by Bull, to promote the exchange of information and understanding of these systems, and to provide guidance to Bull on the essential development and support issues for such systems.
BUX has grown out of the increase in the number of Bull customers wanting to share their experiences and actively propose new ideas and initiatives.
- Its founder members include major organizations such as:
- Atomic Weapons Establishment (UK)
- Barcelona Supercomputing Center (Spain)
- CEA, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives)
- The Jülich Research Center (Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany)
- GENCI, the French National High-Performance Computing organization (Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif)
The Cologne University Regional Research Center (Regionales Rechenzentrum der Universität zu Köln, Germany)
RWTH Aachen University (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, Germany).
For more information >>> http://www.bull.com/extreme-computing/index.html
