by josh perry, editor
[email protected]

atos, a european it services corporation headquartered in bezons, france, has been contracted by forschungszentrum jülich to build the fastest supercomputer in germany, the bullsequana x1000, to be used as part of the human brain project, which uses simulations to gain a greater understanding of the human brain.

the bullsequana x1000 will be the fastest supercomputer in germany. (atos)

according to a press release from atos, the new computer will be a 12-petaflop machine, capable of processing 12 million billion operations per second, and will be not only “germany’s fastest supercomputer” but also one of the most powerful machines in the world.

the system that is being built for forschungszentrum jülich will include 10 bullsequana x1000 cells and will be optimized for free cooling year-round through redundant heat exchangers. atos said that the system will use 10 times less energy that other supercomputers.

atos will also be responsible for operations and on-site support of the supercomputer, with help from munich-based partec.

“the scientific community in germany and europe requires high-quality, flexible and scalable computing power as well as the matching it infrastructure. complex simulation models and unstructured data sets with billions of data points - these are the challenges mastered by the new supercomputing module from atos,” said prof. dr.-ing. wolfgang marquardt, chairman of the board of directors of forschungszentrum jülich, in the release.

thierry breton, chairman and ceo of atos, added, “the fact that forschungszentrum jülich has chosen atos bullsequana supercomputer proves that our european technologies and solutions bring significant value and the necessary trust to more and more research institutes in the demanding challenges they have to tackle.”

according to top500.org, forschungszentrum jülich is currently working with the human brain project and has dedicated its two supercomputer systems, juqueen and jureca, to the research.  

the article explained, “the bullsequana x1000 architecture offers a variety of processors (intel cpus, arm processors, and nvidia gpu accelerators), as well as two choices of interconnects (bull exascale interconnct and infiniband edr).”

installation should take place by the second quarter of 2018.