SCIENCE

Tera 100 has officially broken the petaflops barrier, by recording a performance of 1.05 million billion operations a second (1.05 petaflops) in the Linpack benchmark test for a peak performance of 1.25 petaflops. Performance measured by reference codes like the Linpack benchmark shows actual compute performance (sustained performance). Peak performance is the theoretical maximal performance of all processors. In the TOP500 ranking, those performances are noted respectively Rmax and Rpeak.

This performance means it ranks as the most powerful supercomputer in Europe, and it should rank one of the very best in the world in the TOP500 listing due to be published in mid-November 2010. Its 83.7 percent efficiency rating, the highest among all the supercomputers in its class, and its performance clearly demonstrate the quality of the design work carried out by the teams from Bull and CEA-DAM (the Military Applications Division of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission).

Tera 100 is a cluster of 4,370 bullx S series servers, equipped with 17,480 Intel Xeon 7500 processors. Its central memory features over 140,000 memory modules, delivering a total capacity of 300 TB. It features some 20 petabytes (PB) of disc capacity, accessible at a world record speed of 500 GB/sec.

A general-purpose supercomputer designed for round-the-clock production

The result of a close partnership between Bull and CEA-DAM, Tera 100 is used to support the Simulation program at the Military Applications Division (DAM).

As a general-purpose production supercomputer, Tera 100 has been designed to run the widest possible range of computer simulation applications, so it is quite different from other machines dedicated to running specific applications. It also stands out as a result of its high levels of availability and reliability, which enables it to be fully operational virtually 24 hours a day.

"This latest benchmarking of Tera 100 reaffirms Bull's position as the European leader in computer simulation technologies," commented Philippe Miltin, vice president, Bull Products and Systems. "Tera 100 leverages on Bull's expertise in the design, integration and implemention of supercomputers for production, and is based on Open Source technologies and standard Intel Xeon processors. And using these same open, high-performance and competitive technologies enables Bull to meet even the most demanding requirements of industry and research, for example in healthcare, sustainable development and homeland security."

"Tera 100's proven performance clearly demonstrates the quality of the partnership between the CEA-DAM's teams and those from Bull in technologies that are vital both to State sovereignty and corporate competitiveness," said Jean Gonnord, director for numerical simulation & computer sciences at CEA/DAM. "This opens up the way for even more powerful systems, and for even greater co-operation in the design and development of the next generation of European computers; the exascale systems that are expected to appear before 2020."