Bull, a well-known supplier of high-performance and mission-critical computing solutions, and CEA-DAM (the military applications division of the French alternative energies and atomic energy commission) have announced that their jointly built Tera 100 supercomputer had officially broken the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) barrier, by recording a performance of 1.05 quadrillion (10¹⁵) operations a second  in the Linpack benchmark test amid a peak performance of 1.25PFLOPS.

The 1.05PFLOPS performance means that the Tera 100 ranks as the most powerful supercomputer in Europe, and should also become one of the top 5 highest-performing supercomputers in the world in the new Top 500 list due on the 16th of November (if it was listed now, it would be the third most powerful supercomputer on the globe). The supercomputer is located in Essonne, France.

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

According to Bull, the 83.7% efficiency rating of Tera 100, 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).

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. For example, Tera 100 is used to support the simulation program at the military applications division (DAM). 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.

“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. 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 Exa-scale systems that are expected to appear before 2020," said Jean Gonnord, director for numerical simulation and computer sciences at CEA/DAM.

Tags: Bull, Intel, Beckton