APPLICATIONS

The NovaScale R422 combines high-level performance and optimum cost efficiency in an ultra-dense packaging: Bull has announced a new addition to its NovaScale Universal range. This new server combines an outstanding computing density and space efficiency, an eco-friendly energy efficiency and an efficient cluster administration. Philippe Miltin, Vice-President of Bull's Products and Systems Division, said: "By combining unmatched computing power with the flexibility of industry standards, Bull's solutions offer high performance computing a new world of performance, flexibility and openness. Bull draws on its expertise as a manufacturer of some of the world's largest supercomputers to design all types of infrastructures, finally making HPC affordable and flexible. Proof that our strategy meets customer's demands is that the University of Hanover has already chosen to deploy a large cluster based on this new range of Bull NovaScale servers, while the product was still in its development phase!" Outstanding computing density and space efficiency With two servers in 1U, the NovaScale R422 is a standard server with the density of blades. It delivers savings in terms of chassis-related costs, power supply, cabling and rack costs. With double the computing power within the same space, customers can do more with less space, thus significantly reducing their real-estate or rental costs, and ultimately their total cost of ownership (TCO). More than 5.4Tflops peak performance can be packed within a single rack, delivering maximum performance per square metre. Eco-friendly energy efficiency The NovaScale R422 chassis features a highly efficient power supply unit (PSU) that allows significant savings on energy costs on the long term, thus considerably lowering the TCO. Whereas conventional PSU efficiency rarely reaches above 75%, the NovaScale R422 offers an outstanding power utilization rate of 92%. Efficient cluster administration The NovaScale R422 clusters are delivered with a choice of the Bull Advanced Server (BAS) Linux environment or Microsoft's Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. The BAS software suite for Xeon-based servers is built on top of standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 or 5. This integrated and comprehensive package - designed by Bull - includes the best of Open Source and industry-standard software, together with specific features developed by Bull for high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. It includes comprehensive management tools to allow an entire cluster - including the platform and interconnect network - to be as easily monitored and managed as a single system. Technical specifications The NovaScale R422 features up to two dual or quad-core Intel Xeon processors (5100 or 5300 series). This rackmount server incorporates innovative technologies including the 'Atoka' motherboard jointly designed by Supermicro and Intel, that allows two servers to be fitted into a single 1U chassis: i.e. up to 16 cores, or up to more than 170 Gflops in 1U. The NovaScale R422 is ideally suited for use as a compute node in NovaScale clusters, in combination with NovaScale R440/460 service nodes. With its on-board InfiniBand connector, it offers unlimited scalability while minimizing interconnect cost. Whether for a small, medium or large-scale configuration, anything up to several thousand NovaScale R422 servers can by clustered together to deliver the required computational power. The NovaScale R422 is available now.