Exascale-class supercomputer is here!

PARIS, FRANCE: Atos Chairman and CEO, Thierry Breton in France has revealed Bull sequana, the first exascale-class supercomputer offering a thousand times more performance than current petaflops-scale systems.

Bull is the Atos brand for technology products and software and Atos is one out of three or four worldwide players having the expertise and know-how to build supercomputers today.

Compared to existing systems for a given performance level, Bull sequana is 10 times more energy-efficient and 10 times denser, to fully optimize our sustainability targets and  space-efficiency. It will reach exascale level by 2020, processing a billion operations per second.

Built in the Atos factory of Angers, Bull sequana is currently being implemented at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA).

Bull sequana system is powered by future Intel Xeon processors and the Intel Xeon Phi processor, code-named "Knights Landing",  designed to address the performance, reliability and energy-efficiency requirements of exascale-class supercomputers.

“With Atos’ Bull sequana astounding compute performance, businesses can now more efficiently maximize the value of data on a daily basis,” said Atos Chairman and CEO Thierry Breton.

Real-time security, personalized medicine, precision agriculture or meteorology demand exceptional levels of data processing abilities that sequana generation computers will provide. With greater computational power, meteorology services for instance will be able to provide extremely precise forecasts, predicting fog patches and storms near and around airports.

It will be integrated with the most advanced technologies in the coming years while adapting to existing operating systems. Its open architecture has been designed around major industry standards for hardware and software in order for clients to maximize their investment and save substantial costs.

While extremely high-level computational capacities are primarily designed for major research centers, Bull sequana’s tremendously high density and easy-to-implement integrated components, along with its outstanding reliability, will serve smaller organizations, allowing new usages and services to thrive.