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The system, built for the Military Applications Department of the French Atomic Energy Authority (CEA), has theoretical maximum compute power of 1.25 petaflops. Bull delivered and installed the Tera 100 in March and on May 26 CEA powered the machine on.
"Tera 100 being powered up represents a significant industrial success," CEA's Computer Simulation and IT Project Director Jean Gonnord said in a statement. "It highlights both the CEA's and Bull's expertise in developing ultra high-performance technologies, to the highest level worldwide, and it fully validates the industrial and research partnership that the CEA and Bull have succeeded in developing: a partnership whose outputs will immediately benefit the whole European scientific and industrial community."
The system is based on Intel's latest Xeon 7500 processors. Kirk Skaugen, VP and group data center general manager at Intel, said Tera 100 was "the biggest system ever designed around Intel Xeon processors." It consists of 4,300 of Bull's latest bullx S Series servers (launched in April), carrying a total of 140,000 Xeon 7500 processing cores. Tera 100 has 300 terabytes of central memory and more than 20 petabytes of storage.
The system, built for the Military Applications Department of the French Atomic Energy Authority (CEA), has theoretical maximum compute power of 1.25 petaflops. Bull delivered and installed the Tera 100 in March and on May 26 CEA powered the machine on.
"Tera 100 being powered up represents a significant industrial success," CEA's Computer Simulation and IT Project Director Jean Gonnord said in a statement. "It highlights both the CEA's and Bull's expertise in developing ultra high-performance technologies, to the highest level worldwide, and it fully validates the industrial and research partnership that the CEA and Bull have succeeded in developing: a partnership whose outputs will immediately benefit the whole European scientific and industrial community."
The system is based on Intel's latest Xeon 7500 processors. Kirk Skaugen, VP and group data center general manager at Intel, said Tera 100 was "the biggest system ever designed around Intel Xeon processors." It consists of 4,300 of Bull's latest bullx S Series servers (launched in April), carrying a total of 140,000 Xeon 7500 processing cores. Tera 100 has 300 terabytes of central memory and more than 20 petabytes of storage.
Tera 100 consists of 4,300 bullx S series servers. Image courtesy of Bull
According to Bull, the supercomputer's 500Gbps throughput to the agency's global file system is a world record for such systems. For comparison, the company said its capacity to transfer information was equivalent to one million people watching high-definition video simultaneously.
The CEA performs research and development in low-carbon energy sources, global defense and security, IT and healthcare technologies.
During the project, Bull offered expertise in design and production of high-performance servers and in development of software to run large-scale systems. The CEA's part was system specification, IT architecture, software development and expertise with large-scale data center infrastructures.
The CEA performs research and development in low-carbon energy sources, global defense and security, IT and healthcare technologies.
During the project, Bull offered expertise in design and production of high-performance servers and in development of software to run large-scale systems. The CEA's part was system specification, IT architecture, software development and expertise with large-scale data center infrastructures.