CAPS Entreprise launches compute lab with Bull and NVIDIA

One of the things you guys told me in the reader survey was that you’d like more coverage of smaller companies in addition to the tier 1 and tier 2 vendor coverage we more routinely serve up. So when we get news of something going on at a smaller company these days, or at least one we aren’t familiar with, we pay attention.

On Wednesday CAPS Entreprise, the French company founded in 2002 as an INRIA spin-off that makes multicore development tools, announced that it had created a new solution center for hybrid computing

CAPS enables its customers to experiment their industrial applications on their hybrid platforms before production deployment, obtaining significant performance gain. Today, CAPS Compute Lab makes this evaluation affordable by removing this key barrier to technology adoption represented by the acquisition cost and time of hybrid platforms.

nVidia logo…“All the HPC community is aware of the extraordinary performance potential that GPU-accelerated hardware systems combining NVIDIA Tesla with x86 can bring. There are already a few software applications in production but the adoption pace is quickly growing. Many industrial accounts have started to look at hybrid systems as a mean to speed up their strategic applications.”, explains Jean-Marc Talbot, President & CEO of CAPS entreprise, “However, evaluating the impact of these technologies on the application side requires some effort in terms of acquiring a hardware prototype, installing and getting used to the software environment, porting applications, etc. CAPS Compute Lab initiative aims at accelerating the evaluation step by bringing a ready-to-use cluster along with all the software programming environment and CAPS expertise.”

Bull logoThe CAPS Compute Lab Linux cluster combines 20 BULL NovaScale R422 E2 compute nodes with 10 NVIDIA Tesla S1070 servers for a peak performance of 42 Teraflops. This system comes with all the software components: CAPS HMPP hybrid programming workbench and NVIDIA CUDA environment.

I’d like to see this environment upgraded with the recently announced bullx blades, which seem just made for this kind of customer development center. If the center gets traction with users, it would seem to make good sense for Bull to provide access.