APPLICATIONS

DAM (Military Application Department) of the CEA - the French Nuclear Power Agency - has selected Bull to provide a supercomputer delivering a power of over 60 teraflops. This supercomputer named Tera10 will increase CEA Military Applications Department’s present supercomputing power by the factor of ten. It will be used for its Simulation Program that guarantees the continuation of the French nuclear deterrent, following the cessation of nuclear testing. Designed by Bull, Tera10 will integrate 544 NovaScale 6160 computing nodes, each including eight next generation Itanium processors codenamed Montecito. Montecito will be release next year and will feature dual-core technology. Quadrics, a leader in supercomputing network is to provide QsNetII high performance network to interconnect the NovaScale servers. The global configuration will feature 8,704 processors with 27 terabytes of core memory. Beyond power, Tera10 also requires a huge storage capacity for data produced by the Simulation Program. Therefore, its configuration also includes 54 NovaScale I/O servers managing one petabytes (one million of billions bytes) of disc space with a sustained throughput of 100 GB/s. It also includes two additional NovaScale servers for system management. Tera10 will operate the Bull HPC software platform that includes the Linux operating system and Lustre, the global and parallel file system. This platform is based on an open source software integrated and optimized by Bull’s HPC competence center in Echirolles, France. Tera10 will be fully deployed before end of 2005. By 2010, the CEA physicists will need a power of hundreds of teraflops. Bull and its partners are already working together in this perspective. “Bull is proud to have been selected by CEA to equip its scientific computing complex in Bruyères-le-Châtel, the largest computer in Europe and one the most powerful in the world. With NovaScale, our new generation of servers, and related technologies, we are able to meet CEA’s Simulation Program computing power requirements.” declared Gervais Pellissier, Managing Director of Bull. Jean Gonnord, Head of the digital and IT simulation project of CEA/DAM said “ For our Simulation Program, we have selected Bull’s supercomputer for the global performance it provides . Its architecture based on standard components and open software delivers both scalability and power we require for our future development.” “Intel is very honored that CEA selected the Itanium processor family, and Bull’s NovaScale servers, to support this scientific project. In addition to its mission-critical commercial applications, Itanium architecture shows its leading-edge for complex scientific computing.” Added Abhi Talwalkar, Vice-President and General Manager Enterprise Platfoms Group, Intel. “Quadrics is very pleased that the QsNetII interconnect and software have been selected for the latest CEA supercomputer. We have developed an excellent relationship with Bull, resulting in a product that is unique both in terms of power and functionality” said Quadrics Chief Executive, Cristoforo Romanelli.