Atos installed Bull sequana supercomputer at SURFsara in the Netherlands

Atos installed Bull sequana supercomputer at SURFsara in the Netherlands

• 10 times more energy-efficient and 10 times denser than previous systems
• Fully complies with customers’ sustainability and space-efficiency targets
• Exceptional computing capacity for real-time security, personalized medicine, precision agriculture or meteorology

PARIS, France/Bezons, Salt Lake City, UT, U.S.A., 15-Nov-2016 — /EuropaWire/ — Atos, a global leader in digital services, has installed a Bull sequana supercomputer at SURFsara in the Netherlands to expand the capacity of the national supercomputer Cartesius*. Bull sequana is an open range of supercomputers that is ready to support future exascale technologies – which will make it possible to process a billion billion operations per second. This extension future-proofs the system as Bull sequana can be expanded with the latest technologies, allowing researchers to execute extremely complex research, and SURFsara to fully leverage its investment and save substantial costs. Today the compute capacity of Cartesius has been increased by 18% (to a total of 1.8 Pflops). It will be operational on the 1st of December 2016; the first Bull sequana to be operational worldwide.

The supercomputer at SURFsara is used for scientific research by universities, research institutions and to a growing extent, by business. Cartesius is used for climate research, water management, improving medical treatment, sustainable energy research, noise reduction and product and process optimization.

The Dutch national supercomputer Cartesius has been instrumental in achieving outstanding progress in:

• Support brain research, the improvement of solar cells with nanotechnology and the Digital Health Suite, which allows large organizations to collect all kinds of health data through sensors.
• Engineering: to build cleaner engines, the actual combustion chamber must be finely adjusted. For that a lot of models and simulations are used. With Cartesius, a simulation that would have taken three months can be conducted in a few days’ time.”

Prof. dr. ir. Anwar Osseyran, CEO of SURFsara indicated: “Our society digitizes quickly and thus huge amounts of data become available to researchers. This data has to be analyzed, and more complex models and simulations are necessary. With the new Bull sequana expansion we are able to meet the growing demand for computing power with an on-demand strategy”,

Philippe Vannier, Executive Vice President Big Data & security at Atos concludes: “This project is part of our Exascale program for 2020, under which we are developing a new generation of supercomputers. Numerous institutions and private companies throughout the world use Atos technologies to accelerate research and innovation. We are proud that SURFsara in the Netherlands has opted for a Bull sequana as one of the first worldwide”.

Major industrial clients, academics or research centers worldwide  – including CEA in France,  The Cardiff University in the UK, and the Spanish Genomics Center (CNAG) – use Bull supercomputers.

Atos at SC16
Atos will exhibit the full breadth of its High Performance Computing offer at SC16. Together with SURFsara it will present the key benefits of the installed Bull sequana. Visit booth #721 to discover the latest Bull sequana blades, the BXI high performance interconnect, and extreme factory, the HPC-as-a-service solution from Bull.

Bull supercomputers’ high-data volume processing capabilities are also maximized within Atos’ Big Data services such as “Atos Codex”, an integrated end-to-end analytics solution including predictive computing and cognitive analytics.

Read the blog by Hugo Meiland, member of the Scientific Community at Atos: ‘How supercomputing functions as a lubricant for the European digital economy’

* The Cartesius national supercomputer is hosted by SURFsara and made possible by SURF, with the contribution of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, and the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The supercomputer has the latest Intel processors (Broadwell) and InfiniBand Enhanced Data Rate (EDR).

About Atos
Atos SE (Societas Europaea) is a leader in digital services with pro forma annual revenue of circa EUR 12 billion and 100,000 employees in 72 countries. Serving a global client base, the Group provides Consulting & Systems Integration services, Managed Services & BPO, Cloud operations, Big Data & Cyber-security solutions, as well as transactional services through Worldline, the European leader in the payments and transactional services industry. With its deep technology expertise and industry knowledge, the Group works with clients across different business sectors: Defense, Financial Services, Health, Manufacturing, Media, Utilities, Public sector, Retail, Telecommunications, and Transportation. Atos is focused on business technology that powers progress and helps organizations to create their firm of the future. The Group is the Worldwide Information Technology Partner for the Olympic & Paralympic Games and is listed on the Euronext Paris market. Atos operates under the brands Atos, Atos Consulting, Atos Worldgrid, Bull, Canopy, Unify and Worldline.

Bull is the Atos brand for its technology products and software, which are today distributed in over 50 countries worldwide. With a rich heritage of over 80 years of technological innovation, 2000 patents and a 700 strong R&D team supported by the Atos Scientific Community, it offers products and value-added software to assist clients in their digital transformation, specifically in the areas of Big Data and Cybersecurity and Defense.  www.bull.com | Follow @Bull_com

For more information, please contact:

Jose de Vries
+31 6 30 27 26 11
Jose.devries@atos.net

SOURCE: Atos