Today Atos announced that the first Bull sequana equipped with the company’s new BXI interconnect has entered the TOP500 ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Deployed at CEA in France, the Tera1000 system joins 20 other Atos supercomputers on the TOP500 list.
Atos is incredibly proud to see the concrete results of the Tera1000 project,” said Philippe Vannier, CTO in the Atos Group. “Today we are taking a major step on the road towards exaflops. Undoubtedly, the interconnect technologies will provide a crucial contribution in achieving exaflops performance. With BXI, Atos is confirming its leadership in the field of supercomputers and beyond in the processing of very large volumes of data.”
The Bull sequana supercomputer equipped with BXI is the first “cell” of the 25-petaflop supercomputer that Atos will supply to The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) in 2017 as part of the Tera1000 project. Its architecture heralds the next generation of exascale supercomputers for the 2020s. The first phase of the Tera1000 supercomputer at CEA is currently ranked #55 in the TOP500.
The system that is ranked in the TOP500 is a single Bull sequana cell, featuring 85 compute blades interconnected by a BXI network, with a total of 220 Intel Xeon Phi 7250 processors, coming to a theoretical peak power of 670 teraflops . It is developing a Linpack performance of 380.5 teraflops. For the first time in the world, a supercomputer is equipped with the new generation BXI network developed by Atos. BXI is one of the key technologies that will eventually enable us to reach exascale level performances.
Bull sequana supercomputers are produced at the Atos factory in Angers, France. They are designed based on the worldwide expertise of engineers from the Atos group, as well as long-standing partnerships with major customers such as the CEA: the tried-and-tested methodology of co-design aims to optimise the performance of the simulation code – supercomputer pairing.
Meeting the challenge of exaflops and big data is a major issue for research, defense and industry, as it opens up a whole field that today remains unexplored and inaccessible, making it possible for us to not only understand, but also simulate complex physical phenomena and industrial systems,” said François Geleznikoff, Head of the CEA’s Military Applications Division. “In Europe, the CEA, in partnership with Atos, is particularly well positioned to meet this challenge – both in terms of the expertise of its teams, and the dynamism of its computing facilities, which are open to all fields of research and industry.”
In related news, the Atos supercomputer ‘Santos Dumont’ at LNCC in Brazil ranked #364 received an award from the TOP500 organization as it is the largest supercomputer in South America.
