Bull Clinches Tera10 Supercomputer Deal for French Nukes

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Having just been bailed out by the French government, it comes as no surprise that indigenous server maker Bull has secured a contract with the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA) to build a supercomputer cluster based on the future dual-core "Montecito" Itanium processors from Intel.

CEA has some prior experience with Bull's NovaScale servers, since it used a 16-node cluster based on 16-way NovaScale machines using the current "Madison" Itanium 2 processors to crack some complex security codes using that 1.3 teraflops machine. The algorithms to crack the SHA-0 code developed by the U.S. National Security Agency were created by the University of Versailles and run on the CEA machine, which is also called TeraNova.

Tera10 will offer about 40 teraflops of peak computing power, provided that the Montecitos come out at 1.5 GHz; this will represent about a ten-fold factor in aggregate performance improvement for all of the supercomputers at the CEA today, says Bull. Unlike the U.S. government, which says that the giant supercomputers at the government-sponsored research labs are being used to manage its nuclear weapons stockpile, the French government comes clean and says outright that the Tera10 machine will be used for nuclear weapon simulations that will allow it to maintain its nuclear deterrence advantage in the political world, which is exactly what all nuclear powers are doing with at least some of their big supercomputers.

The Tera10 cluster will be comprised of 544 of Bull's NovaScale 6160 servers, which have eight processor sockets. The cluster will have 4,352 Montecito processors, which is 8,704 processor cores, which will be fed by 27 TB of main memory and 54 NovaScale I/O servers with a total of 1 petabyte (PB, or 1,000 TB) of disk storage. The NovaScale nodes will be linked to each other through a QsNETII high-speed switch interconnect from Quadrics and the whole shebang will be managed from a pair of NovaScale servers set up as system management nodes. Bull says that Tera10 will be fully deployed by the end of 2005, and that by 2010, the French government, egged on by CEA physicists who want better nuclear simulations, will push into the realm of hundreds of teraflops in a single NovaScale cluster. The Tera10 cluster will run Linux (most likely Mandrakesoft's variant, which is also French, but possibly Novell's or Red Hat's Linux will be used). Bull also added in the open source Lustre global, parallel file system to the cluster.

Financial terms of the Tera10 project were not divulged by Bull.