Bull goes green with new supercomputer

Bull has launched a supercomputer that's been designed to be particularly energy efficient. 

Bullx, a supercomputer that uses blade servers and water cooling to be green and fast. has been developed to suit the demands of high-performance computing customers, according to Fabio Gallo, vice president and general manager of Bull Extreme Computing Solutions. The number-one criterion for these customers is application performance, but having an energy-efficient system is also becoming increasingly important, Gallo said.

The bullx system is based on blade servers. Using blades is the most efficient way of building large-scale parallel systems. They are both easier to install and maintain compared to separate servers, according to Gallo.

Each computing blade in the bullx system is equipped two quad core Intel Xeon 5500 processors, and up to 18 blades can be installed in one chassis. Blades talk to each other using an integrated Infiniband QDR (Quad Data Rate) switch, which supports up to 40G bps. A rack can then be fitted with six chassis, and the number of racks in a system is unlimited. To get performance of 1 petaflop - which right now is the performance of the largest systems in the world -- out of the bullx a customer needs 100 racks, Gallo said.

Besides computing blades there are also so-called accelerator blades, which use graphics processors to speed up floating point calculations by offloading them from the computing blades.

The accelerator blades are not for everyone, because to take advantage of the improvements the cards offer, applications have to be ported and tuned, according to Gallo. But there quite a lot of organisations that develop their own code that are eager to do the porting and tuning, and Bull can also help them with that, Gallo said.

Another important part of the system is that the racks use water-cooled doors for all configurations of the system. The use of water cooling is key when building energy-efficient data centers, because it's up to 75 percent more efficient than using air cooling, according to Gallo.

The bullx also comes with integrated protection against short bursts electrical power. That means customers won't have to use uninterruptible power supplies, which make the data centre less energy efficient, Gallo said.

The system runs either Red Hat Enterprise Linux plus its own cluster suite or Windows HPC Server 2008.

Bull started pushing the high-performance computing space in 2005 and last year it acquired the German company science + computing. Currently, Bull has approximately 100 customers.

With the bullx it targets production high-performance computing in the government sector, at automotive and aerospace companies, at oil and gas companies and in the financial services area, according to Gallo. Applications include seismic processing, weather forecasting and crash analysis, he said.

The cost of the bullx will vary from tens of thousands of euros to tens of millions of euros depending on the size of the configuration.