The Bull Group has been contributing for several years now to high-performance computing projects internationally, particularly in Germany, in the public sector for research and education, and in the private sector. Bull has recently delivered two of the most powerful European supercomputers to the French Atomic Energy Authority, the CEA (Tera-10), and to the CCRT, the French Center for Research and Technology Computing.

Under the leadership of Professor Stephan Olbrich, the Institute of Research at the Heinrich Heine University, the ZIM Institute and the Chair of IT Management are predominantly involved in the following key areas, also the main areas for future co-operation:

• Visualization technologies: These technologies are concerned with developing algorithms, models and application concepts for analyzing series of complex data, for scientific and e-learning applications. This area includes simulations and visualization scenarios with highly interactive 3D virtual reality technologies.
• Scientific computing: The objective is to develop and test collaborative solutions including simulations and visualization. The research work particularly covers optimization (parallelization, ultra high-speed networks), resource management and information system security.

For the two years the collaborative agreement is due to last, three key projects are being evaluated in the areas of intensive visualization technologies and HPC clusters:

• Project 1: Design of administration tools for Bull's clusters and hybrid clusters: The aim of this project is to develop methods and tools for administering and optimizing HPC cluster solutions used by the university. The cluster architecture is hybrid (heterogeneous), and is built around a network of front-line, administration and computation servers, combining Intel Itanium 2 ('Montecito') and Intel Xeon ('Woodcrest') processors. The first such hybrid cluster to be installed in a German higher educational establishment, it features homogeneous management of different platforms integrating the two types of Intel processor.
• Project 2: Bull competence and demonstration centre: This project aims to establish a competence and demonstration center to present shared developments and results, as well as for benchmark testing and customer demonstrations. The center will also be used to port applications to Intel Itanium 2 and Intel Xeon environments.
• Project 3: Ultra powerful visualization solutions for scientific computing: This project aims to offer services in the area of graphics and visualization solutions. It will set out to analyse technological advances, particularly in intensive visualization (Scalable Graphics), and visualization of data and specific customer queries in graphical format, and making virtual reality and mobile components for 3D visualization available to research laboratories.

"We have a particularly effective co-operative relationship with Bull's experts, enabling us to undertake projects that are scientifically enriching - both in terms of skills and products - for both our organizations, in the areas of cluster administration and intensive visualization", stated Professor Stephan Olbrich.

"Development work in the domains of software components and HPC cluster environment technologies have been part of our core commitment for several years now, underlining the vital role that research plays at Bull", emphasized Michael Gerhards, Managing Director, Bull Germany.