The new ranking underlines Europe's return to the fore in the high-performance computing (HPC) technologies that are so strategic in terms of national sovereignty and competitive advantage in business.

The 27th edition of the TOP500, listing the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers confirms Tera 10 - the supercomputer developed by Bull and installed at the French Atomic Energy Authority (CEA) - as the number one in Europe and number five in the world. The latest version of the list was unveiled in front of the world's greatest supercomputing experts, meeting in Dresden, Germany for ISC2006.

Tera 10 is used for the Simulation Programme run by the CEA's Military Applications Directorate (CEA/DAM). The programme is designed to ensure the continuing effectiveness of the French nuclear deterrent following the cessation of nuclear testing.

"Tera 10's position, as the number one supercomputer in Europe and fifth in the world, confirms Bull's strategy to concentrate on industry-standard, open technologies", added Michel Lepert, Bull's General Manager of Products and Systems activities. "This clearly illustrates Bull's expertise in complex, large-scale IT architectures."

Designed by Bull, Tera 10 comprises a cluster of 544 NovaScale computing nodes, each featuring eight new-generation Dual-Core Intel Itanium processors, code-named 'Montecito'. The NovaScale servers are interconnected via an ultra high-performance Quadrics QsNet II network, an expert in supercomputing networks. Overall, Tera 10 provides the processing capacity of 4532 dual-core processors and 30TB of core memory. The performance of 42.9 Teraflops of power was measured on 4000 processors, which demonstrates Tera 10's infrastructure outstanding efficiency.

Over and above the computing power, the implementation of Tera 10 requires enormous storage capacity for the data produced by the Simulation Program. So the Tera 10 configuration also features 56 NovaScale I/O servers managing a PB (one million, billion bytes) of disk space, with 100GB of bandwidth. It also includes two NovaScale system administration servers.

Tera 10 runs Bull's HPC software platform which most notably features the Linux operating system and Lustre parallel global file system. The platform is built around a number of Open Source software components that have been fully integrated and optimized by Bull at its HPC Competence Center at Echirolles in France.