Supercomputers are hottest in America and China, but earlier this week Europe reached a new milestone. The European supercomputer Tera 100 reached the magical PetaFLOPS barrier by registering a Linpack result of 1.05 PFLOPS.
Tera 100 was built by Bull and French CEA-DAM and is expected to climb into topp5 on the list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers – updated on the 16th of November at Top500.org.
This performance means it ranks as the most powerful supercomputer in Europe, and it should rank one of the very best in the world, in the TOP 500 listing due to be published in mid-November 2010. Its 83.7% efficiency rating, the highest among all the supercomputers in its class, and its performance clearly demonstrate the quality of the design work carried out by the teams from Bull and CEA-DAM (the Military Applications Division of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission).
Tera 100 houses 4,370 computer clusters from the Bullx S series with a total of 17,480 octo-core Intel Xeon 7500 processors paired with no less than 140,000 memory modules. With 300 TB RAM and 20 Petabyte storage space there is just a lot of crunching power. That the storage systems sends data with world record speed 500 GB/s doesn’t make it any less of an accomplishment.
Tera 100 is used for simulations in the French military, but has been designed to handle a load of applications and can now entitle itself the fastest and only PetaFLOPS computer in Europe.
