… As Well as LSI

LSI Corporation announced that the Military Applications Division (DAM) of the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) has installed LSI storage system technology in its petaflop-scale data center hosting the Tera 100 supercomputer. With theoretical processing power of 1.25 petaflops, Tera 100 is among the most powerful supercomputers ever designed and developed in Europe. 

The implementation of LSI storage technology at CEA/DAM is part of a new OEM partnership between LSI and Bull. The CEA, a government-funded technology research organization, initiated a collaborative program with Bull in 2008 designed to extending the data center capability of the Tera 100 supercomputing center. CEA/DAM will utilize the Tera 100 supercomputer for its nuclear weapons simulation program aimed at guaranteeing the reliability of France’s nuclear weapons. 

"Supercomputing solutions are essential technology that help to accelerate scientific research by supporting the requirements of the world’s most demanding application environments," said Jacques-Charles Lafoucrière, Chef de Service, CEA/DAM. "It’s just great. LSI technology and design enable us to set up our data center architecture to support both our high performance and high capacity data requirement."

To meet the needs of CEA’s weapons simulation program, Tera 100 must support the requirements of a broad spectrum of applications by offering a balance between processing power, data throughput and fault tolerance. The Tera 100 storage cluster combines bullx S Series servers and LSI storage technology to deliver 200 GB/s bandwidth to the CEA IT center’s 15 petabyte clustered infrastructure running the Lustre file system.

"Bull is continually developing strategic alliances to strengthen its position and expertise in all the key elements of the IT value chain," said Fabio Gallo, vice president, Extreme Computing solutions at Bull. "Our partnership with LSI is based on their proven heritage of delivering storage solutions to OEM customers that combine mature architecture, intelligent design and feature-rich software. The collaboration with LSI underscores our mission to offer the most comprehensive and powerful range of solutions available to the HPC market."

The LSI partnership with CEA/DAM and Bull is aimed at projects with data management requirements expanding into the petabyte realm. The bullx servers and bullx cluster suite for Extreme Computing, when integrated with LSI storage system technology deliver complete, factory built and tested solutions that are easily and quickly integrated into HPC infrastructures.

"Bull is an ideal partner to help LSI expand our HPC business," said Steve Hochberg, senior director, Worldwide HPC Segment, LSI. "The integration of LSI storage technology with Bull’s HPC product offerings will provide customers such as CEA/DAM with a dense, performance-focused and cost-effective storage system to meet the challenging data throughput requirements of their forecasting and simulation projects."

Real also:

Bull to Sell Petaflop HPC Tera 100 at CEA
After already installing current Tera 10

Tera 100 for the CEA, Europe’s Most Powerful HPC, Said Bull
1.25 petaflops, managing 20PB