Dell Servers Power 38.8 Tflops HPC Cluster at University of Bordeaux

ClusterVision, a company specialized in developing HPC, storage and database clusters, has just announced that it opened a new system at the University of Bordeaux in France that is based on Dell PowerEdge C6100 servers capable of delivering 38.8 Tflops.

The system, which is called "Avakus" is comprised out of 528 Intel Xeon X5675 processors, for a grand total of 3168 physical cores installed inside Dell’s energy-efficient PowerEdge C6100 servers.

These are connected together with a high-speed QDR InfiniBand interconnect developed by QLogic .

The enclosures, power and cooling technology is provided by Rittal, with Fraunhofer's FhGFS, and Bright Computing's Bright Cluster Manager driving the 120TB parallel file system and advanced cluster management capabilities, respectively.

Scientists at the University of Bordeaux will use this new HPC cluster for numerical modeling of seismic waves, physical-numerical modeling for nuclear fusion, while also using the supercomputing in the service of archaeology.

ClusterVision provided the lead for the technology partnership, coordinating systems, software and service components from Dell, Intel, QLogic, NVIDIA, and others.

"The opening of the Bordeaux HPC cluster marks the culmination of a highly successful collaboration between the various academic, scientific and technology parties,” said Christopher Huggins, Sales & Marketing Director, ClusterVision.

“ClusterVision are proud to have taken the lead role in coordinating the complex components of this prestigious project, and we are pleased to help celebrate the new breadth and depth of scientific research which this facility will enable," concluded the company’s rep.

The fastest supercomputer in France is installed at the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique in the city of Bruyeres-le-Chatel and it uses 138368 computing cores and Infiniband QDR technology in order to deliver a peak performance of 1254.55 Tflops.