Bull Builds Bura Supercomputer at University of Rijeka

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atos-bura-supercompuer-by-bull-unveiled-by-president-of-the-republic-of-croatia-ms-kolinda-grabar-kitarovićToday Bull Atos announced it has successfully installed the most powerful supercomputer in the Adriatic region. Named after the Croatian North Wind, the new Bura supercomputer at the University of Rijeka will be used in biotechnological and biomedical research and will be available to institutions and companies from abroad.

The Bura supercomputer is based on Bull DLC B720 water-cooled servers. It consists of 288 nodes, each node containing two Intel Xeon E5-2690 v3 processors, for a system with a total of 6912 processor cores, and a total output of 239.64 Teraflops (Rmax). The supercomputer has over 18 terabytes of RAM and disk systems capacities of 850 terabytes. The Mellanox InfiniBand FDR 56GB network system ensures rapid communication between components of the Bura supercomputer cluster.

Rijeka University’s new datacenter is the only one of its kind in the region that offers a direct water-cooling system with warm water up to 40°C. This means that the Bura supercomputer is cooled using the so-called “free-cooling” technique, which cools using outside air up to a temperature of 24°C. The BURA is a “green” computer according to testing performed by Green 500, placing it at the 175th position worldwide.

The University of Rijeka was established in 1973 as a logical expansion of higher education institutions in western Croatia. Its roots date back to the 17th century with the founding of Rijeka’s Jesuit Secondary School. Since its foundation, it has undergone a series of transformations that were mainly the result of changes in national higher education policies. Today the University integrates the functions of its constituent parts and ensures their uniform and coordinated action. Its mission is dedicated to making strategic and progressive decisions on a range of issues concerning the functioning of the academic community, as well as continuous encouragement for international competitiveness in all areas of scientific, artistic and professional activity. Through active collaboration with the industry and partnerships for community development, the University endeavours to contribute to the socio-cultural transition into a knowledge society. Its vision is to have the University of Rijeka enter among the 500 European universities, and so its objective is a dynamic development that systematically and methodically encourages mobility and the development of research careers, as well as allowing the presentation of talents and entrepreneurial energy of each individual.

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