Appendix H: About Bull S.A.S.

Bull is one of the leading European IT companies, and has become an indisputable player in the High-Performance Computing field in Europe, with exceptional growth over the past four years, major contracts, numerous records broken, and significant investments in R&D.

In June 2009, Bull confirmed its commitment to supercomputing, with the launch of its bullx range: the first European-designed supercomputers to be totally dedicated to Extreme Computing. Designed by Bull’s team of specialists working in close collaboration with major customers, bullx embodies the company’s strategy to become one of the three worldwide leaders in Extreme Computing, and number one in Europe. The bullx supercomputers benefit from the know-how and skills of Europe’s largest center of expertise dedicated to Extreme Computing. Delivering anything from a few teraflops to several petaflops of computing power, they are easy to implement by everyone from a small R&D office to a world-class data center.

Bull has now won worldwide recognition thanks to several TOP500-class systems (see [38]). Bull gathered significant momentum in HPC in recent years, with over 120 customers in 15 countries across three continents. The spread of countries and industry sectors covered, as well as the sheer diversity of solutions that Bull has sold, illustrates the reputation that the company now enjoys. From the first major supercomputer installed at the CEA to the numerous supercomputers delivered to many higher education establishments in Brazil, France, Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom – such as the two large clusters acquired by the Jülich Research Center, which deliver a global peak performance of more than 300 teraflops. In industry, prestigious customers including Alcan, Pininfarina, Dassault-Aviation and Alenia have chosen Bull solutions. And Miracle Machines in Singapore implemented a Bull supercomputer that will be used to study and help predict tsunamis.

Alongside this commercial success, the breaking of a number of world records highlights Bull's expertise in the design and integration of the most advanced technologies. Bull systems have achieved some major performance records, particularly for ultra-large file systems, image searches in very large-scale databases (the engines of future research), and the search for new prime numbers. These systems have also been used to carry out the most extensive simulation ever of the formation of the structures of the Universe.

To prepare the systems of the future, Bull is a founder or a member of several important consortia including Parma which forms part of ITEA2 and brings a large number of European research centers to develop the next generation of parallel systems. Finally, Bull is a founder member of the POPS consortium - under the auspices of the SYSTEM@TIC competitiveness cluster based in the Ile de France region, which is developing tomorrow's petascale systems.

Bull and the French Atomic Energy Authority (CEA) are currently collaborating to design and build Tera 100, the future petascale supercomputer to support the French nuclear simulation program.

For more information, visit https://www.bull.com/hpc.