Tera-10

The CEA’s strategic simulation programme relies on the TERA-10 supercomputer designed by Bull The most powerful computer ever designed and developed in Europe Number 1 European supercomputer (number 5 in the world) in the June 2006 TOP500 Supercomputer ranking

The CEA (France 's Atomic Energy Authority, Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique) – a major public sector player in technology research – operates in three main areas: energy, information and healthcare technologies, defense and security, by building on its excellence in fundamental research. As a major player in the European research landscape, with renowned international expertise, the CEA cultivates many collaborative initiatives with international partners.

TERA-10: raising the stakes significantly

Achieving a ten-fold increase in processing power to support the CEA’s Simulation program, increasing storage capacity by 20 times and input-output performance by 15 times: these were the main performance objectives of the TERA-10 initiative compared to the original TERA-1 supercomputer. In order to provide guaranteed round-the-clock service continuity, the TERA-10 system is equipped with highly comprehensive functionalities in terms of reliability and system administration.

Beyond 52 teraflops of processing power

TERA-10 forms a cluster of 625 Bull NovaScale servers, including 567 compute servers with 8 Intel® Itanium®2 dual core processors each, 56 dedicated I/O servers and 2 administration servers. With 10,000 Intel® Itanium® 2 cores, TERA-10 offers a processing capacity in excess of 52 teraflops, and 30 terabytes of core memory, which put it in 2006 in
5th place of the worldwide supercomputer sites ranking. It is the largest supercomputer ever designed and assembled in Europe.

Simplified representation of TERA-10 architecture

TERA- 10 integrates the best technologies in the industry: Intel® Itanium® 2 processors; Quadrics’ QsNetII® clustering solution; Data Direct Networks’® network storage and CFS’ Lustre® file system.

Jean Gonnord, Head of the digital and IT simulation project of CEA/DAM said "For our Simulation Program, we have selected Bull's supercomputer for the global performance it provides. Its architecture based on standard components and open software delivers both scalability and power we require for our future development."

"Intel is very honored that CEA selected the Itanium® processor family, and Bull's NovaScale servers, to support this scientific project. In addition to its mission-critical commercial applications, Itanium architecture shows its leading-edge for complex scientific computing." Brian Harrison – Director, Intel EMEA

"Quadrics is very pleased that the QsNetII interconnect and software have been selected for the latest CEA supercomputer. We have developed an excellent relationship with Bull, resulting in a product that is unique both in terms of power and functionality" said Quadrics Chief Executive, Cristoforo Romanelli.

Web site: www.cea.fr