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Education and research
Accelerating time-to-discovery

HPC provides today’s researchers with an essential means of investigation that helps them push back the boundaries of science and accelerate time-to-discovery. However, most Education and Research customers have research activities that span many disciplines – physics, chemistry, biosciences, earth and ocean sciences, mathematics, medicine, engineering… This breadth of applications can lead to complex IT requirements. Bull is ready to help, with integrated and flexible HPC solutions that leave researchers free to focus on their research – not on cluster administration or data management.

Why Bull for Education and Research

A proven track record of designing and deploying large complex systems at numerous research institutes and universities in Europe and around the world.

Bull has implemented several TOP500-class HPC systems for renowned Research Centres – and many smaller systems in University Departments and other smaller sites. Dozens of Universities and Research Institutes in France, Germany, United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Slovenia and Brazil rely on Bull HPC solutions to boost their research and generate breakthrough discoveries.

The expertise of the Bull Extreme COmputing Competence Centre at your disposal – in Europe

Capitalizing on our experience on pioneering projects, Bull’s Extreme Computing Competence Centre is established as a leading facility in Europe. Our HPC specialists provide expert-to-expert support as part of customer projects. And the proximity of our Extreme COmputing Competence Centre, located in the French Alps, greatly facilitates exchanges with European customers.
Bull’s HPC benchmarking team has high-level expertise in optimizing user applications. They have helped many scientific customers optimize their codes for maximum performance – recent publicized examples are an astrophysical fluid dynamics code used by Project Horizon to simulate the formation of the Universe (more information: http://www.wcm.bull.com/internet/pr/new_rend.jsp?DocId=307215&lang=en) or the INRIA’s artificial intelligence GO engine (more information: http://www.bull.com/bulldirect/N24/bref.html).

Bull partners with leading research consortia to develop advanced HPC technologies

Bull’s experts are working on continuous performance improvement and are preparing the intensive computing technologies of tomorrow by playing an active role in many European cooperative research projects. To make sure that Bull systems enter the Petaflops dimension with the same values of openness and accessibility.

Bull has a strong commitment to various projects related to HPC innovations, such as:

Infrastructure projects: FAME2, CARRIOCAS, POPS, SCOS
Application projects: NUMASIS (seismic), TELEDOS (health), ParMA (manufacturing, embedded), POPS (pharmaceutical, automotive, financial applications, multi-physical simulations…), HiPIP (image processing), OPSIM (Numerical optimization and robust design techniques), CSDL (complex systems design), EXPAMTION (CAD Mechatronics), CILOE (CAD Electronics), APAS-IPK (Life Sciences).
Tools: application parallelizing, debugging and optimizing (PARA, POPS, ParMA)
Hybrid systems: OpenGPU

Bull is a founding member of:

the TALOS alliance, created in February 2007 by Bull, CEA, HLRS (the German national HPC centre), Intel and Quadrics, and aimed at accelerating the development of high-performance computing solutions in Europe (http://www.wcm.bull.com/internet/pr/new_rend.jsp?DocId=209971&lang=en)
the Ter@tec association - 49 organisations coming from fundamental research, industry and information technologies join their efforts to promote and contribute to the development of High-Performance Computing and Simulations in Europe (http://www.teratec.eu/)

An extensive experience in partnership and knowledge transfer with academic customers

As Europe’s only IT manufacturer, Bull is keen to partner with European Universities and Research Institutes in different technology fields. With Bull’s R&D centres in the European time zone, collaborative working can be both practical and effective – for the mutual benefit of both partners.

Bull and the CEA (French Atomic Agency) collaborate to design Tera 100, a European petaflops-scale supercomputer.

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Bull proposed to Cardiff University an innovative cooperation package, with the creation of a joint HPC “Centre of Excellence” to promote the use of HPC and a Quick Start Training Programme that takes a partnership approach – including knowledge transfer.

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Bull signed a co-operation agreement with the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf in June 2007. This cooperation covers the areas of visualization technologies, software components and HPC cluster technologies. The results of joint developments are gradually incorporated into Bull's product range, and the University of Düsseldorf acts as a Bull competence and demonstration centre for Germany..

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