Tera-10

TERA-10 is a supercomputer built by Bull SA for the french Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique, (Atomic Energy Commission).

According to the TOP500 list (as of november 2006), it is currently the seventh fastest computer in the world running at 52.84 teraFLOPs, or 52.84 trillion floating point calculations per second, using nearly 10,000 processor cores (in about 4800 dual-core processors). It is also the fastest computer running the Linux operating system, with an SMP kernel specially modified to handle very large symmetric clusters currently cadenced by a 8-processors central system.

Its main application is the simulation of atomic experiences and the maintenance of the French nuclear defence force, using the results of true nuclear tests (between 1956 and 1995, most of them in the French Nuclear Test Plant in the Pacific) and the new results obtained from the LMJ ("Laser Mega-Joule") built in continental France.

This is the end of a second generation of evolutions, the next generation will reach about 100 TeraFLOPS (expected in 2009) using processors with more internal cores and a new central scheduling system allowing asymmetric operation on a variable number of processors, for easier upgrades, lower maintenance cost, and more experiences requiring different computing scales, without having to rebuild the whole cluster. This new system should be renamed "Tera-100".