Bull Powers "Curie" Soon to be Europe's Most Powerful Super

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The French national High-Performance Computing organization, GENCI, has purchased what will be Europe’s most powerful supercomputer from Bull. Named after the famed scientists Pierre and Marie Curie, the 1.6 Petaflop system will be used for academic research in the areas of high-energy physics, chemistry, nanotechnology, energy, medicine, biology, and climatology.

We need significant computer processing power to simulate, as realistically as possible, the climates of the past and of the present, and to project ourselves into the future according to various scenarios in terms of its evolution,” explained Jean Jouzel, one of the Vice Presidents of the IPCC and Director of the Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace. “With Curie, we can envisage carrying out ensemble multi-model climate simulations to a resolution of just a few tens of kilometers across the whole planet, for simulations covering several hundreds of years.”

The Curie supercomputer will have over 90,000 processing cores, a storage capacity of over 10 PB, and the I/O capacity to transfer data at speeds up to 250 GB/s. Curie will be implemented in two phases – the first between now and the end of the year and the second in October 2011 – at the TGCC (Très Grand Centre de Calcul), the very large-scale computing center that CEA is currently building in Bruyères-le-Châtel, France.