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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