Barcelona European Centre for Parallelism Chooses Bull's NovaScale® Server for High-Performance Computing
Paris / Barcelona,
February
16, 2004 -
The Catalonia Polytechnic University in Barcelona has signed an agreement for Bull to provide its "European Centre for Parallelism" (CEPBA) with a Bull NovaScale® server to help it meet its high-performance computing needs.
The CEPBA is a research centre dedicated to high-performance computing, which works with Ferrari, EADS, Veritas and a number of other leading European companies. Its activities range from parallel computing of a bank's data warehouse and complex calculations on aero-dynamics for the automotive industry to satellite imaging for agriculture and the optimisation of X-ray therapy in the medical field.
The CEPBA is actively involved in several projects with other high-performance computing centres in Europe, including the University of Stuttgart, which is also equipped with a Bull NovaScale® server.
For the Barcelona facility, Bull delivered a 8-processor Bull NovaScale® 5160 server, which can be upgraded to 16 processors. The European Centre now has the most powerful environments for its tests and benchmarks.
Bull NovaScale® is a range of standards-based modular servers which draw upon Bull's FAME (Flexible Architecture for Multiple Environments) architecture and leverage the Intel® Itanium® 64-bit family of processors. This combination gives these servers mainframe-class features: scalability, robustness and offer an exceptionally low entry cost for high-end servers. The Intel® Itanium® processor architecture offers almost unlimited potential for evolution over the long term. NovaScale® servers can run Linux® versions of both Red Hat and SuSE, Windows® Server 2003, as well as Bull's operating system GCOS, to provide Bull's customers and partners with a wide range of solutions.
"The powerful SMP architecture of the Bull NovaScale® servers, together with the performance of the Intel® Itanium®2 processors, will strengthen both our university and industry research at an excellent price/performance ratio," said Professor Mateo Valeo at the European Centre for Parallelism in Barcelona.
"Intel® Itanium® 2 processor-based servers are enabling breakthrough research to happen faster and more affordably for commercial and academic institutions around the world. By combining high scalability with excellent price/performance, Bull NovaScale® Itanium-based servers are spurring discoveries and innovation in sectors ranging from medical to automotive," said Tom Garrison, Director of Enterprise Marketing, Intel EMEA.
"We take pride in our collaboration with this prestigious university research centre," said Bruno Pinna, Director of the Intel business unit at Bull. "It represents yet another step in Bull's success in the high-performance computing arena in Europe and is testimony to our ability to provide innovative and competitive solutions in this area."
About Bull
Bull designs and develops servers, software and services for an open environment, integrating the most advanced technologies. In this respect, Bull's range of NovaScale servers combines the openness of standards with the robustness of mainframes. It brings to its customers its expertise and know-how to help them in the transformation of their information systems and to optimize their IT infrastructure and their applications.
Bull is particularly present in the public sector, banking, finance, telecommunication, utilities and manufacturing sectors. Capitalizing on its wide experience, the Group has a thorough understanding of the business and specific processes of these sectors, thus enabling it to efficiently advise and to accompany its customers. Its distribution network spreads to over 100 countries worldwide.
About
Barcelona European Centre for Parallelism
The Centre federates the high performance computing experience of the University, and more specifically that of the IT architecture department. The Ministry of Education launched the Centre which is now funded by the "Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)" and the "Universidades, Investigación y Sociedad de la Información" of the Catalunya region. Dedicated to the promotion of parallelism, this Centre has a wide experience in IT architecture as well as in parallelism, algorithms, compilers and programmation modelism.
The Centre has gained a strong recognition in tools, operational systems communications as well as in its collaboration with industrial companies and research centres.
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