HPCwire: Bull Announces bullx Supercomputers

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June 16, 2009

Bull Announces bullx Supercomputers

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PARIS, June 16 -- Bull has launched its bullx supercomputer: the first European-designed supercomputer to be totally dedicated to Extreme Computing. Designed by Bull's team of specialists working in close collaboration with major customers, bullx embodies the company's strategy to become one of the three worldwide leaders in Extreme Computing, and number one in Europe. With bullx, access to innovation will be simpler and faster, for all kinds of businesses and research laboratories.

Didier Lamouche, Bull chairman and CEO, comments: "The period of acute crisis the world is going through is actually giving us an opportunity to take a closer look at the practices we have all been using, and to rebuild a world that should be based on two foundation stones: innovation and environmental awareness. By allowing us to carry out tests and build prototypes virtually, computer simulation can help researchers and industry speed up projects and open up new horizons, without consuming actual materials or carrying out potentially risky experiments. This is where Extreme Computing comes in: a formidable strategic tool which opens up the possibility of numerous, spectacular applications that will have a significant impact on people's everyday lives in the future. bullx -- the new family of supercomputers which we are launching today -- is the most tangible illustration of this vision in Europe today."

bullx: meeting the key challenges of energy consumption, power and operational effectiveness

With the bullx range, Bull is pushing back the boundaries still further, by tackling three key challenges: energy consumption, power and operational effectiveness. Cutting the energy consumption of supercomputers. Co-ordinating the tasks of thousands of processing cores, all running simultaneously. And finally, orchestrating and administering the complexity inherent in such systems... The choice of the components used to create bullx, as well as its architecture, has been guided by its vocation: to be the most effective instrument for innovation. Designed by Europe's largest team of experts in the field, bullx is the product of an unparalleled pool of expertise, created by Bull specialists who offer local proximity, rapid response and the ability to deploy powerful, customized solutions.

bullx: high performance in every dimension, for computing centers of every size

Energy-efficient, ultra-dense and ultra-powerful, bullx has been designed specifically for intensive computing by the largest team of experts in Extreme Computing in Europe. With more than 500 dedicated experts involved in the project, this represents an unparalleled skill-base. Built in line with industry standards, and featuring the best open source applications on the market, bullx has been expressly designed to enable the construction and implementation of extremely reliable and robust production environments.

bullx's technical characteristics -- including its scalability, density, low power consumption and powerful in-built computational accelerators -- mean it is an unprecedented platform, which can meet the needs of everything from a small design office to a major international research center, in areas as diverse as bio and earth sciences, energy, the oil and chemical industries, climatology, aeronautics, the automotive and finance sectors...

Designed to deliver anything from a number of teraflops to several petaflops of power, bullx guarantees outstanding performance in every aspect of its operation: integer and floating point calculation, speed and memory capacity, internal system communications, input-output power, ease of implementation and use, and total cost of ownership.

An architecture built for performance and high-density, with simplified, ultra-fast connector technology

bullx is built around an architecture that features ultra-dense blade servers interconnected via a powerful dedicated network. This in turn is administered by bullx cluster suite, a software suite developed by Bull using open source and standard components.

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