French Atomic Energy Commission CEA orders Fujitsu VPP5000 supercomputer

Tokyo 20 Sep 99 The French Atomic Energy Commission, (Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique, CEA) has ordered a Fujitsu VPP5000 supercomputer with a peak performance of 144 Gflop/s. The machine will be delivered to CEA's civil research centre in Grenoble in November 1999 and will replace the current Fujitsu VPP300E system. CEA will use the VPP5000 for a variety of research activities, such as the development of applications in the areas of energy, industry, research, health care, and environmental protection.

Mr. Alain Hoffmann, Director of Computing for CEA, said, "CEA chose the VPP5000 after a call for procurement for its new vector supercomputer, during which the VPP5000 showed the highest sustained performance and performance/cost ratio over representative CEA applications. We were also impressed by the excellent support available from the Fujitsu team in France. We are convinced that the VPP5000 will satisfy CEA's increasing computing demands towards the new century, and that it is an ideal machine with the high scalability required for possible future expansion of the system."

Successor to the VX/VPP300/VPP700 series, the VPP5000 is Fujitsu's newest generation high-performance vector parallel supercomputer series. The parallel architecture of the VPP5000 Series realizes scalable computing performance with configurations ranging from a single processor to a maximum of 512 processors.

The maximum performance of each processor is 9.6 Gflop/s.

Fujitsu has delivered a total of 400 vector supercomputers throughout the world, of which 152 are in the VX/VPP300/VPP700 series. More than 30 VPP Series systems have been installed throughout Europe. Furthermore, several universities in Germany, along with the European Centre of Medium Weather Forecasting in the UK, are reaping the benefits of the VPP Series.

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