LSI storage in France's new PFLOPS system

Remember that PFLOPS Bull system that the French Atomic Energy Authority powered up late last week (they are billing it as the largest system in Europe, but as I suspected it hadn’t been up long enough to make the June list)? Turns out that it has an LSI storage array attached to it. LSI has been very active this week: they also announced a partnership with Cray that will make LSI the vendor of choice for the new Intel-based CX-1000 midrange super from Cray.

LSI logoThe implementation of LSI storage technology at CEA/DAM is part of a new OEM partnership between LSI and Bull, a leading high performance computing (HPC) solutions provider based in Europe. The CEA, a government-funded technology research organization, initiated a collaborative program with Bull in 2008 designed to extending the data center capability of the Tera 100 supercomputing center. CEA/DAM will utilize the Tera 100 supercomputer for its nuclear weapons simulation program aimed at guaranteeing the reliability of France’s nuclear weapons.

…To meet the needs of CEA’s weapons simulation program, Tera 100 must support the requirements of a broad spectrum of applications by offering a balance between processing power, data throughput and fault tolerance. The Tera 100 storage cluster combines bullx S Series servers and LSI storage technology to deliver 200 GB/s bandwidth to the CEA IT center’s 15 petabyte clustered infrastructure running the LustreTM file system.