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Home > News > Members and Partners News > Bull
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| September 16, 2016 -
Atos is Platinum sponsor of NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC), organized for the first time in Europe, in Amsterdam on September 28-29. Atos will exhibit its new Bull sequana blade, which leverages the NVIDIA® Pascal™ architecture. The Bull sequana X1115 blade is powered by four Tesla® P100 GPUs, interconnected with NVIDIA NVLink™, a high-bandwidth, energy-efficient interconnect that enables ultra-fast communication between GPUs. With Bull sequana X1115, Atos delivers on its promise of openness and modularity for the sequana platform, with the implementation of various processor/accelerator technologies, to serve large-scale HPC, Deep Learning and Big Data. |
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Decembr 4, 2015 -
Bull, the Atos brand for technology products and software, today launches Bull sequana X1000, its new range of exascale-class supercomputers, the forerunners of the generation that will offer a thousand times more performance than current petaflops-scale systems. This compute performance is necessary to increase the quality and speed of digital simulations for both research and industry, so as to be in a position to tackle the 21st century socio-economic challenges. For example, Bull sequana can be implemented to improve the accuracy of weather forecasts, build even cleaner aircraft engines and use genomics to develop personalized medicine. “Digital simulation is an essential tool to accompany the digital transformation of our clients. In this new data-centric era, large processing infrastructures are an essential lever for development and wealth creation. Atos is proud to offer its customers a supercomputer that allows them to reinvent their business model,” said Thierry Breton, Chairman and CEO of Atos. “In partnership with CEA and other strategic clients, the Bull teams have been developing market-leading innovative solutions, in terms of compute performance, to process large volumes of data and in terms of energy consumption. As a leader in the exascale race, Bull puts its expertise and know-how at the service of its clients, to accelerate research and innovation and increase their competitiveness,” explains Philippe Vannier, Executive Vice-President Big Data & Security and Chief Technology Officer of the Atos Group. Many vendors are still struggling with technical limitations in the exascale race. Thanks to its innovation capacities, Bull delivers an innovative solution that matches the exascale technological challenges.
Bull sequana is designed to integrate the most advanced technologies in terms of processors, interconnect and data storage –that will make it possible to reach exascale. Open and designed around major industry standards for hardware and software, Bull sequana supercomputers offer customers a large choice of technologies to maximise their investment
An exascale class-system relying on current technologies, would consume around 400 megawatts, equivalent to the yearly electrical annual consumption of 60,000 homes. Bull sequana reduces energy consumption by a factor of 10 as compared to the previous generation of supercomputers. Bull is targeting an electrical consumption of 20 megawatts for exascale by 2020, thanks to its technologies and its research and development centers.
Organization, localization, storage and access to data, all of which are increasing exponentially, have a major impact on performance. Bull provides a hardware and software architecture adapted to the most complex treatment of data and based on its research in distributed systems management and data access.
The performance of exascale applications requires massive parallelism. Bull sequana integrates the Bull Exascale Interconnect (BXI) network, developed by Bull. Designed for exascale, BXI revolutionizes the treatment of data exchanges by freeing the processors of all communications tasks. In addition, the Bull sequana software environment allows a precise management of large resources and provides optimum production efficiency.
An exaflops-scale supercomputer includes tens of thousands of components. Such a system must incorporate high quality resilience. The architecture and packaging of Bull sequana were designed with this objective in mind, including the redundancy of critical components, and efficient software suite and management tools.
From design to operational use, Bull sequana supercomputers integrate cutting-edge technologies. Real Formula 1 IT, they offer the highest levels of performance, quality, robustness and flexibility. For François Geleznikoff, Director of CEA military applications, commented: "CEA is pleased to get this year the first prototype of the exascale supercomputer planned for 2020. This is our third generation of supercomputer supplied by Bull, which allows us to perform with great speed and reliability both physical modeling and very complex systems calculations.” "GENCI welcome the Bull sequana exascale class supercomputers that will help researchers meet the major challenges of the 21st century in societal areas such as health, environment and new energy. In order to best prepare the French scientific communities to this next generation of supercomputers, GENCI has established a collaboration with Bull and Intel to evaluate the potential of these technologies and their suitability for a representative set of scientific applications of the major themes of the research," said Catherine Rivière, CEO of GENCI. "Science is endless. The complexity of questions asked by the researchers at the forefront of scientific endeavors today require computer simulation that reaches from the subatomic to the intergalactic, from the Big Bang to the end of time. With Sequana, Bull is pushing the boundaries of computing, not merely to add three more zeroes to the end of a benchmark, but to provide a tool for implementing the ideas of today's greatest minds, to give us greater understanding of the universe and everything in it," said Addison Snell, Intersect360 Research “The new Bull sequana system, powered by future Intel® Xeon® processors and the Intel® Xeon Phi™ processor, code-named "Knights Landing", is designed to address the performance, reliability and energy-efficiency requirements of exascale-class supercomputers,” said Raj Hazra, vice president and general manager, Enterprise and HPC Platforms Group, Intel Corporation. “We’re excited to be collaborating with Bull to bring to market this new generation of supercomputers on the path to exascale.” (1) CEA/ INTEL |
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November 18, 2014 -
Bull, an Atos company, today unveils its exascale program. The main ambition of this program is to design and develop in Europe the next generation of supercomputers that will contribute to producing world-class solutions for both research and industrial purposes. With one of the largest teams dedicated to High-Performance Computing (HPC) – now able to leverage the international strength of Atos, with its 86,000 employees worldwide – Bull is experiencing a paradigm shift that will give it the critical mass to address vertical market sectors across the entire world. Exascale will increase the competitiveness and innovation capabilities of industries and address the industrial, scientific and societal challenges of the 2020s, from nanoscience and genomics to climatology, aeronautics and energy. As such, the Bull exascale program is a key contributor to Europe’s leadership in science and innovation, as well to its position in the HPC field. It is aligned with the Strategic Research Agenda proposed by ETP4HPC (the European Technology Platform for High Performance Computing). This new generation of supercomputers will be capable of achieving a performance of more than one exaflops, i.e. one billion billion operations a second, a thousand times more powerful than current systems. Exascale computing power is believed to be the order of processing power that matches the human brain. AT THE CROSSROADS WHERE BIG DATA AND HPC COMBINE Most of the complex problems scientists and engineers will address in the future are at the crossroads where Big Data meets HPC. For instance, domains like genomic therapy and drug discovery, full-scale simulations of aircraft or modelling of entire weather systems – that involve huge volumes of data and demand massive computing power – require exascale supercomputers and beyond. The Bull exascale program therefore relies on tight integration between high levels of computing power and the capacity to process huge amount of data. It combines faster processors, more data capacity, ultra-fast interconnections, greater energy efficiency, enhanced cooling, a scalable packaging, fundamentally redesigned software and a full set of services to optimize user applications. The Bull exascale program initially involves the development of five main elements:
The Bull exascale program derives synergies from Bull’s global mission to deliver Big Data, HPC and security solutions. It is the result of major investments in R&D, close cooperation with European labs such as the CEA (the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Authority) and other partners, and the long-standing experience built up by Bull’s HPC teams in designing, implementing and running large-scale HPC systems. It relies upon the Bull Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming (CEPP) for the application expertise needed to reengineer existing applications so as to make the most of exascale systems. “To fulfill its missions, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) set up a R&D program in partnership with industry which aims at developing the key technologies needed to design and build competitive supercomputers by 2020. Within this framework, CEA and Bull have renewed their long-time partnership that led in 2010 to the first petaflops supercomputer designed and manufactured in Europe,” said Pierre Leca, Head of Simulation and Software Engineering at the CEA. “With the unveiling of its exascale program, Bull has reaffirmed its capacity for innovation and its ability to design the world's most powerful supercomputers. Bull meets the needs of performance and reliability that our customers require to handle the massive amounts of data generated in the digital world and to help solve major societal and environmental challenges that are arising in our societies,” said Philippe Vannier, Bull’s CEO. |
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| November 17, 2014 - OCCIGEN: Pushing the frontiers of science and technology With its new large scale supercomputer called OCCIGEN (pronounced oxygen), GENCI, the French HPC agency, provides French scientists with a great boost of the global capacity available and makes a technological leap toward energy efficiency with Bull and Intel. GENCI, the French HPC agency, has acquired in June 2014 a new 2.1 Pflops large scale supercomputer called OCCIGEN (pronounced oxygen). This Bull system is installed at the National Computer Center for Higher Education (Cines, Centre informatique national de l'enseignement supérieur), one of the three national computing centers in France. It multiplies by more than 8 times the computing resources available at Cines and allows GENCI to provide French scientists with a great boost of the global capacity available reaching a total of 5.7 Pflops. OCCIGEN is powered by the 12 cores Intel® Xeon® E5-2690 v3 processor, for a total amount of 50 000 cores and its balanced architecture includes more than 200 TB of distributed memory and an I/O subsystem able to manage data at a speed of over 100GB/s, using Intel supported Lustre*. Thanks to this performance, OCCIGEN will be capable of addressing any type of numerical simulation and managing massive amounts of data. It is also designed to subsequently accommodate hybrid technologies. Going green Based on the direct liquid cooled bullx B720 compute blades, the OCCIGEN supercomputer has a peak compute performance in excess of 2 PFlops (2 million billion floating point operations per second), implementing the new Intel AVX2 instruction set, thanks to its Intel® Xeon® Processors E5-2690 v3 Family (code-named Haswell-EP). OCCIGEN reached a « Linpack » performance of more than "OCCIGEN is therefore positioned as one of the most energy-efficient x86 supercomputers (global consumption of 975kW, i.e. 1,670 Mflops/W per node) and is an outstanding addition to the HPCG list of bullx supercomputers with a performance of 45474.6 GFlops. It is now one of the most efficient HPC systems both in terms of performance and energy-efficiency, and a key asset for French digital simulation and research” declared Pascal Barbolosi, VP Extreme Computing at Bull, an Atos company. World premieres expected And, as a first and great result, OCCIGEN has already demonstrated its performances on real scientific key applications with impressive improvements of more than 20% for SPECFEM3D (geophysics) and up to 274% for YALES2 (combustion), in comparison with GENCI current petascale systems. OCCIGEN will be in full production for all French scientists in January 2015 but is already open in pre-production mode for performing “Grands Challenges” including world premiere in climate modeling, massive LES simulation of wind turbines or brain modeling. “Our priority is to give to French scientists the means to be in a good position in the international scientific community, by making the best resources available for them, while minimizing the environmental impact. With OCCIGEN, the latest of our supercomputers to be installed, GENCI has completely revamped French computing resources, but is also firmly committed to an eco-responsible approach. The expected OCCIGEN performance will pave the way to great scientific achievements in all fields. ” Catherine Riviere, CEO of GENCI, said. *Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others. |
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