Bull has announced a new family of supercomputers, Bullx, which it claims to meet the challenges of energy consumption, power and operational effectiveness.
According to Bull, the new Bullx range consumes less energy, co-ordinates the tasks of thousands of processing cores, all running simultaneously and also orchestrating and administering the complexity inherent in such systems.
Bull said that Bullx has in-built computational accelerators and is built around an architecture which features ultra-dense blade servers interconnected via a network. It uses blade architecture to share essential components, such as the power supply and links to the interconnection network, within the chassis.
According to Bull, each compute blade in the Bullx system incorporates Intel Xeon 5500 series (Nehalem) processors and connectivity with an adaptor to the integrated interconnection network that can function without local storage or with SSD-type (Solid State Drive) storage.
The company said that the new architecture uses an ultra-capacitor module which is expected to improve the efficiency of the electrical power supply by 10-15% compared with traditional power supplies, a cooling door that consumes 75% less power than a standard cooling system and processor control system to optimise electricity consumption.
Bull also developed Bullx cluster suite built around a Linux system and Open Source components. The suite reportedly offers the facility to control the overall configuration, servers, the interconnection and storage network.
Fabio Gallo, vice-president and director of extreme computing solutions at Bull Group, said: We have designed the Bullx supercomputers to respond to even the most extreme demands for computing power, while at the same time guaranteeing maximum energy efficiency.
