The Military Applications Division (DAM) of the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) has installed LSI storage system technology in its petaflop-scale data centre, which hosts the Tera 100 supercomputer. With theoretical processing power of 1.25 petaflops, Tera 100 is among the most powerful supercomputers ever designed and developed in Europe.
The implementation of LSI storage technology at CEA/DAM is part of a new OEM partnership between LSI and Bull. The CEA, a government-funded technology research organisation, initiated a collaborative programme with Bull in 2008 designed to extend the data centre capability of the Tera 100 supercomputing centre. CEA/DAM will utilise the Tera 100 supercomputer for its nuclear weapons simulation programme aimed at guaranteeing the reliability of France's nuclear weapons.
'Supercomputing solutions are essential technology that help to accelerate scientific research by supporting the requirements of the world's most demanding application environments,' said Jacques-Charles Lafoucrière, Chef de Service, CEA/DAM. 'It's just great. LSI technology and design enable us to set up our data centre architecture to support both our high performance and high capacity data requirements.'
To meet the needs of CEA's weapons simulation program, Tera 100 must support the requirements of a broad spectrum of applications by offering a balance between processing power, data throughput and fault tolerance. The Tera 100 storage cluster combines bullx S Series servers and LSI storage technology to deliver 200 GB/s bandwidth to the CEA IT centre's 15 petabyte clustered infrastructure running the Lustre file system.
