Atos takes wraps off supercomputer

France’s economy minister, Emmanuel Macron, is among those attending today’s launch by tech and software group Atos of Bull sequana, described as “the first exascale-class supercomputer offering a thousand times more performance than current petaflops-scale systems”.

Bull is the Atos brand for its technology products and software, which are distributed in over 50 countries.

The group claims that compared to existing systems for a given performance level, Bull sequana is 10 times more energy-efficient and 10 times denser, fully optimising sustainability targets and space-efficiency. It has already been adopted by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA).

“Atos is one out of three or four worldwide players having the expertise and know-how to build supercomputers today – and the only one in Europe,” said Atos chairman and chief executive officer (CEO), Thierry Breton.

He added that Bull Sequana would enable businesses to more efficiently maximise the value of data on a daily basis. “By 2020, [it] will reach exaflops level and will be able to process a billion billion operations per second.”

Atos noted that real-time security, personalised medicine, precision agriculture and meteorology are among the industries demanding 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,” the group forecasts.

“Bull sequana … will be integrated with the most advanced technologies in the coming years while adapting to existing operating systems,” Atos added. “Its open architecture has been designed around major industry standards for hardware and software in order for clients to maximise their investment and save substantial costs.”

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