Quadrics - Tera-10, Europe's largest supercomputer

Tera-10, Europe's largest supercomputer

Overview

Tera-10, the new supercomputer of the Commissariat à l' Énergie Atomique (CEA), is a colossal machine, 602 nodes connected with three rails of Quadrics' high-performance QsNet^II network. Designed by Bull, Tera-10 integrates 544 NovaScale 6160 compute servers, each with eight Intel dual-core Montecito processors, with an I/O system that can store in excess of 1 Petabyte of data and deliver it to the nodes at least 100Gbytes/sec. The compute cores share 27 terabytes of memory.
The system is called Tera-10 as it is designed to sustain at least 10 Teraflop/s on the CEA's application. Linpack performance is excess of 60 Teraflops/s, making Tera-10 the most powerful supercomputer in Europe. Tera-10 runs the Bull HPC software stack, this includes the BAS4 Linux kernel and distribution, the Lustre parallel file system, the Quadrics Resource Management System (RMS) and the Bull/Quadrics MPI.

Performance

60 Teraflops of computing power

27 Terabytes of memory

1 Petabytes of disc space with a throughput of 100GB/s

The impressive results are achieved through a combination of remarkable advanced features:

System Spec and Performance

544 Bull Novascale compute servers

3 rails of Quadrics QsNet^II interconnect

54 NovaScale I/0 servers

Quadrics parallel fibre links

Bull Linux kernel and distribution

Quadrics resource management system

Quadrics/Bull MPI


Cable	1of the 8 aisles of Tera10	544 Bull's Novascale	90 KM of networking

"Our simulation program requires outstanding performance from the network interconnecting the nodes of such a large machine, especially in terms of latency and barrier synchronization. Quadrics, who we chose for our previous computer TERA-1, is still today the only one able to meet such a challenge."
Jean Gonnord, Numerical Simulation & IT program director at CEA/DAM


Further information is avaialable by clicking on the following:
Le supercalculateur Tera-10 (January 2006) (pdf)
Press-Kit from CEA (in French)
The CEA chooses Bull to supply Europe's most powerful supercomputer (pdf)
Bull and Intel's Case Study on Tera-10
DataDirect will provide 1 petabyte of networked storage for Europe's fastest supercomputer at CEA
DataDirect's PR on Tera-10's networked Storage
LUSTRE File System 100GB/s sustainable bandwidth (pdf)
Bull and CFS's presentation on Tera-10's File System
Quadrics has been selected by Bull to provide QsNet for Europe's fastest computer
Quadrics' PR on Tera-10 interconnect
CEA (Comm. Energie Atomique)
Primeur's description of CEA
La France et l'Europe de retour dans la course aux supercalculateurs
Article published by Le Monde (in French)
Le calcul haute performance
Special dossier published by le Recherche (in French)
Interview with Jean Gonnord CEA, concerning the 60 TeraFlop/s Bull acquisition
by Primeur
Tera-10 è in grado di compiere alcuni miliardi di operazioni al secondo
Article published on RAI News (in Italian)

> Legal