OIL & GAS

Bull has expanded its NovaScale™ range of servers to include innovative solutions specifically for high performance computing. The servers provide enough calculation power to handle the most complex applications. While meeting demand for more open and more powerful standard solutions, capable of supporting ever increasing volumes of data, Bull’s new offering paves the way to simulations which enhance understanding and knowledge of phenomena in the fields of physics, genetics, and even social and economic behavior. Bull’s solutions consist of NovaScale™ servers, clusters of server interconnection networks, networked storage solutions and software tools for administration and development, as well as optimization, of technical and high performance computing applications. They benefit from Bull’s expertise in large servers, storage architectures and Open Source software. The use of Open Source and standard components guarantees an outstanding price/performance ratio. Bull NovaScale™ servers: performance and competitiveness for high performance computing. Based on standard building blocks - Intel®’s Itanium® 2 processors - these high-end servers offer customers immediate benefits by significantly optimizing the total cost of ownership of their IT infrastructure. Developed in close cooperation with Intel, the high-end Bull NovaScale™ server range constitutes a key milestone in Bull’s strategy of designing powerful IT environments based on standard technologies to meet the toughest demands in terms of flexibility, scalability and robustness. FAME (Flexible Architecture for Multiple Environments), the innovative architecture of Bull NovaScale™ large servers, provides unique features in terms of maintainability, reliability and scalability. Today, the large Bull NovaScale™ servers support from 2 to 16 processors, and will soon be able to handle 32. With an SMP (Symmetrical Multi-Processor) architecture, they can efficiently support very large bandwidth and memory sizes. Bull NovaScale™ servers are truly efficient (servers). The 16-processor Bull NovaScale™ server has achieved performance of more than 83 Gflops on the Linpack benchmark. Each Bull NovaScale™ server can run several environments simultaneously, including Microsoft® Windows®, Linux® and Bull’s proprietary operating system GCOS, on a single server. Server cluster solutions for scientific applications For applications requiring several calculation nodes, Bull has partnered with Quadrics to develop server cluster solutions. These solutions make it possible to build configurations of up to several Tera-flops. They bring optimum performance, both in terms of bandwidth and latency regardless of the number of Bull NovaScale™ server processors being used as nodes. These clusters include a complete software environment, with administration tools to make operations as easy as though they were run on a single system Powerful network storage solutions Bull has validated and integrated the network storage solutions of its partner, DataDirect Networks, for high performance computing. Silicon Storage Appliance (S2A) products give Bull NovaScale™ servers and server clusters access to data at very high bit rates and the ability to run the most I/O demanding simulation applications. These storage solutions are particularly suited to the needs of large, “cluster-type” applications where a large number of servers have to rapidly access several tera-bytes of data. A complete software environment Bull offers a complete software environment for high performance computing. Based on a Linux® kernel optimized for 64-bit servers, this environment includes powerful compilers as well as numerous scientific libraries, Open Source software, and software from HPC specialists. As such, this environment provides any programming model for high performance computing and specific tools for applications tuning and optimization. Bull’s Competence Center for High Performance Computing: Located in Grenoble, this center helps Bull’s customers in the choice of architecture and infrastructure, deployment, systems optimization, storage solutions and applications.