Bull-X for CENPES (November 2009)

France’s computer champion has made its first high performance computing (HPC) sale to the oil and gas vertical with the announcement that Petrobras’ CENPES research and development (R&D) unit is acquiring a 250 teraflop ‘Bull-X’ cluster. The new machine, from Bull’s ‘Extreme Computing’ product line, is a CPU/GPU* hybrid and is to be used in Petrobras’ seismic imaging research effort.

Bull upped the ante in its HPC effort a couple of years back with the  acquisition of French  HPC systems integrator Serviware. Serviware has implemented HP-based supercomputers for Total E&P and last year installed a 17 teraflop Linux-based Supermicro cluster at the French Petroleum Institute (IFP).

The Petrobras/CENPES machine would notionally appear in the top 20 of the TOP500 list of supercomputers—assuming that its quoted teraflops translate directly into a Linpack number.

The Bull-X supercomputer will be located in a Petrobras’ data center, currently nearing completion, on the campus of Rio de Janeiro University. Bull has installed six other supercomputers at Brazil’s federal universities. More from www.bull.com.

* Central/graphics processing unit.

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