The bullion server developed by Bull has been ranked as the world’s fastest X86 enterprise-class server, according to the international SPECint®_rate2006[1] benchmark. The benchmark – which was run on a ‘fat’, 16-socket configuration – highlights bullion’s exceptional characteristics, which make it almost twice as powerful as all its rivals. Featuring 160 Intel® Xeon® E7 cores and 4 Terabytes of RAM, the bullion server achieved peak performance of 4,110 according to the SPECint®2006 benchmark. The fastest competitive system only managed a performance of 2,180.
The results posted by the bullion server clearly demonstrate the power of its architecture and the technological superiority of the Bull Coherence Switch (BCS) over the technologies used in rival servers. Developed by Bull, BCS is also used in the bullx S series of supercomputers. It enables the power available from all 16 sockets to be shared, and boost bullion’s performance by some 120% compared with competitors’ servers that are limited to 8 sockets and equipped with so-called ‘glueless’ technology.
The six most powerful servers based on Intel® X86 architecture
Source Bull. Specint®_rate 2006 data, July 2012
Massive-scale virtualization and Big Data
As the world’s first system to feature native use of VMware technology, bullion is used in numerous companies and public sector bodies, principally in Europe, Africa and Brazil.
Supporting over 500 virtual machines (VMs) and several ‘Monster VMs’, bullion enables applications and databases to be consolidated within its modular and reliable architecture.
Finally, when it comes to Business Intelligence (BI), bullion makes the most of its exceptional 4 Terabyte memory to process intensive analytical queries on huge amounts of unstructured data, even in real time thanks to its ‘in memory’ technologies.
Comparable system performance
| Supplier | System | Performance | Architecture |
| Bull | bullion | 4110 | X86 |
| Hewlett-Packard | ProLiant DL980 G7 | 2180 | X86 |
| Fujitsu | PRIMEQUEST 1800E2 | 1890 | X86 |
| Oracle | Sun Fire X4800 | 1380 | X86 |
| IBM | System x3850 X5 | 1250 | X86 |
| Cisco | UCS C460 M2 | 1160 | X86 |
Source: SPECint®_rate2006 data, July 2012
[1] The bullion server was ranked No.1 in the Specint®_rate 2006 classifications of July 2012
