Bull Charges Ahead in Supercomputing Despite Big Data Refocus

By Nicole Hemsoth

July 2, 2014

In many ways, Bull has been a mirror, reflecting companies like Cray from across the Atlantic. One on the one hand, both companies have deep roots in supercomputing, with particularly strong continental bases. Conversely, the arrival of the big data phenomenon has marked a chance for both companies to wrench free from strict supercomputing affiliations and find a new path to deliver high-end, high performance systems to an entirely new and rapidly class of potential enterprise users—customers who might not consider what they do to be exactly “HPC” but who have serious computational and data-driven needs that vanilla servers or database approaches can’t tackle.

While Cray, SGI, and a few other HPC-oriented companies have focused on rolling out appliances directed at the larger big data market (consider the Urika appliance from Cray as an example) Bull has seen the same opportunities in Europe (where it does 85% of its overall business) and taken similar steps to bake their reputation for large-scale computing for science and industrial supercomputing into new offerings aimed at more mainstream enterprise big data problems. Their “OneBull” vision, which was spelled out at the beginning of this year, is aimed at integrating the new business around big data and cloud computing as a top priority with 6% of all revenues being pushed into research and development, where they fit HPC and security together.

Breakdown of Bull's business reach by sector. Recall that 85% of this is in Europe, with 55% in its native France.
Breakdown of Bull’s business reach by sector. Recall that 85% of this is in Europe, with 55% in its native France.

Representative of this newly weighted approach to the extreme scale market (which can include both supercomputing and large-scale enterprise) is today’s announcement from Bull of their new line of servers. Called the Bullion S, these are more designed for the big data and cloud spaces. The new severs are designed to support up to 240 Xeon E7-based nodes with up to 24 TB of memory, making them a fit for in-memory, data-intensive workloads, but also those that require significant compute. Earlier in the year the company echoed what other HPC-rooted companies are doing to extend their customer base into the mainstream enterprise market with a big data appliance in conjunction with real-time search company Sinequa.

Although Bull is making moves to shake free from the narrower supercomputing distinction, the company is not leaving its HPC segment in the enterprise big data dust. The company had a strong showing at ISC last week in Leipzig, Germany in terms of news around fresh deployments and new technologies that will be integrated into future supercomputers. Still, the company has only a total of 17 systems on the Top500, with the top site at CEA (#26) and all but one of their systems in Europe (the exception being the Helios machine at the International Fusion Energy Research Center). This is an improvement for Bull, which had 10 systems total on the Top 500 in 2011 and a mere 5 machines in 2009.

Among new additions to their coming Top500 growth, the French national high performance computing organization, GENCI, is set to acquire a 2,106-node warm water-cooled system from Bull to boost a wide range of research projects. The new supercomputer, which is expected to come online in January 2015, will be called OCCIGEN and will be housed at CINES in Montpellier. It will be equipped with what Bull calls “next-generation Xeon processors” but there is no confirmation about which processors they’re referring to, but the logical assumption, since no one expects the real next-generation Xeon for HPC (Knight’s Landing) to emerge in time for an early 2015-slated system. Is that this means Xeon E7 v2 and/or Xeon Phi. Bull says only that at this point, the system has been designed to “accommodate hybrid technologies.”

The 2-petaflop OCCIGEN machine is expected to boast 200 TB of memory with an IO system to allow it to push data to task at over 100GB/s to meet the demands of large-scale scientific simulation and data-intensive research. The cold plate, warm water cooling system, which is designed to deliver component-level chilling, will push the PUE of the system to an expected 1.1 rating.

The National Center for Genome Analysis in Barcelona, which is one of the top genetic research sites in Europe, has also tapped Bull for a new system that will target large-scale gene sequencing projects. While details about the node count or type of system that was purchased are not public, the center’s director says that their problems demand more than “traditional computing” they’ve had to rely on in the past. “The solution is not to increase the number of sequencers. The key lies in the balance between sequencing and HPC. It’s not only about increasing sequencing capacity by acquiring new hardware, but designing and appropriate computing infrastructure…it is essential to choose a flexible architecture that can grow without limits the keep pace with genome projects,” he remarked.

In addition to the user stories we learned about during International Supercomputing Conference Week, Bull also announced a strategic partnership with another recently acquired company. Bull can now resell Xyratex (now part of Seagate) can resell ClusterStor offerings as part of their future system. The deal was inked with news about a technical partnership between the two for a contract at Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum (DKRZ) wherein Bull designed and installed a 3-petaflop Bullx B720 super outfitted with 45 petabytes of ClusterStor CS9000 parallel storage capable of 1TB/s of performance, which will help the climate simulation facility better handle its growing volumes of data.

With the One Bull plan in full effect and a recent acquisition by a company that is solely focused on enterprise big data and cloud computing, it will be interesting to see how the company’s investments in supercomputing will persist. At ISC there were no signs of reduced investment and the news of new wins show that there is still value in pursuing large-scale HPC sites.

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, code-named Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from its predecessors, including the red-hot H100 and A100 GPUs. Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. While Nvidia may not spring to mind when thinking of the quant Read more…

2024 Winter Classic: Meet the HPE Mentors

March 18, 2024

The latest installment of the 2024 Winter Classic Studio Update Show features our interview with the HPE mentor team who introduced our student teams to the joys (and potential sorrows) of the HPL (LINPACK) and accompany Read more…

Houston We Have a Solution: Addressing the HPC and Tech Talent Gap

March 15, 2024

Generations of Houstonian teachers, counselors, and parents have either worked in the aerospace industry or know people who do - the prospect of entering the field was normalized for boys in 1969 when the Apollo 11 missi Read more…

Apple Buys DarwinAI Deepening its AI Push According to Report

March 14, 2024

Apple has purchased Canadian AI startup DarwinAI according to a Bloomberg report today. Apparently the deal was done early this year but still hasn’t been publicly announced according to the report. Apple is preparing Read more…

Survey of Rapid Training Methods for Neural Networks

March 14, 2024

Artificial neural networks are computing systems with interconnected layers that process and learn from data. During training, neural networks utilize optimization algorithms to iteratively refine their parameters until Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, code-named Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Houston We Have a Solution: Addressing the HPC and Tech Talent Gap

March 15, 2024

Generations of Houstonian teachers, counselors, and parents have either worked in the aerospace industry or know people who do - the prospect of entering the fi Read more…

Survey of Rapid Training Methods for Neural Networks

March 14, 2024

Artificial neural networks are computing systems with interconnected layers that process and learn from data. During training, neural networks utilize optimizat Read more…

PASQAL Issues Roadmap to 10,000 Qubits in 2026 and Fault Tolerance in 2028

March 13, 2024

Paris-based PASQAL, a developer of neutral atom-based quantum computers, yesterday issued a roadmap for delivering systems with 10,000 physical qubits in 2026 a Read more…

India Is an AI Powerhouse Waiting to Happen, but Challenges Await

March 12, 2024

The Indian government is pushing full speed ahead to make the country an attractive technology base, especially in the hot fields of AI and semiconductors, but Read more…

Charles Tahan Exits National Quantum Coordination Office

March 12, 2024

(March 1, 2024) My first official day at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was June 15, 2020, during the depths of the COVID-19 loc Read more…

AI Bias In the Spotlight On International Women’s Day

March 11, 2024

What impact does AI bias have on women and girls? What can people do to increase female participation in the AI field? These are some of the questions the tech Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Analyst Panel Says Take the Quantum Computing Plunge Now…

November 27, 2023

Should you start exploring quantum computing? Yes, said a panel of analysts convened at Tabor Communications HPC and AI on Wall Street conference earlier this y Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Training of 1-Trillion Parameter Scientific AI Begins

November 13, 2023

A US national lab has started training a massive AI brain that could ultimately become the must-have computing resource for scientific researchers. Argonne N Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire