Tera 10 is No. 1 in Europe

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9 August 2006 News

The French Atomic Energy Authority’s Tera 10 supercomputer has been ranked number one in Europe and number five in the world in the 27th TOP500 listing of the world’s supercomputers. Installed in 2005, the supercomputer is made up of 544 Bull NovaScale computing nodes and 58 I/O management and system administration nodes.

Maurice Staal, acting managing director of Bull South Africa explains: "The TOP500, listing the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers confirms Tera10 - the supercomputer developed by Bull and installed at the French Atomic Energy Authority (CEA) - is elected as the number one in Europe and number five in the world. The latest version of this list was unveiled in front of the world's greatest supercomputing experts, meeting in Dresden, Germany for ISC2006."

Tera 10 is used for the Simulation Program run by the CEA's Military Applications Directorate (CEA/DAM). The program is designed to ensure the continuing effectiveness of the French nuclear deterrent following the cessation of nuclear testing.

Designed by Bull, Tera 10 comprises a cluster of 544 Bull NovaScale computing nodes, each featuring eight new-generation Dual-Core Intel Itanium processors, code-named 'Montecito'. The NovaScale servers are interconnected via an ultra high-performance Quadrics QsNet II network, a world leader in supercomputing networks. Overall, Tera 10 provides the processing capacity of 4532 dual-core processors and 30 TB of core memory. The performance of 42,9 Teraflops of power was measured on 4000 processors.

Over and above the computing power, the implementation of Tera 10 requires enormous storage capacity for the data produced by the simulation program. It thus also features 56 NovaScale I/O servers managing a petabyte (one million, billion bytes) of disk space, with 100 GB of bandwidth.

Tera 10 runs Bull's HPC software platform that notably features the Linux operating system and Lustre parallel global file system. The platform is built around a number of Open Source software components that have been fully integrated and optimised by Bull at its HPC Competence Center at Echirolles in France.

For more information contact Maurice Staal, Bull Computers South Africa, +27 (0)11 253 6900, [email protected]

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Tera 10 is No. 1 in Europe

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