Bull in a cosmos shop: Edinburgh uni boffins strike deal with Atos for BullSequana supercomputer

Boffins at the University of Edinburgh will soon be able to get their hands on a new high-powered supercomputer to help them "unlock the secrets of the universe" following a deal with European tech outfit Atos. The university has handed Atos a contract to deliver its BullSequana XH2000 supercomputing system described as being …

[TVU]

This reminds me of the new Met Office supercomputer - there's an on site supercomputer assisted up by additional cloud computing capability. While Atos haven't explicitly said what operating system of the BullSequana XH2000 is, I'm pretty sure it's RHEL.

[ToddRundgrensUtopia]

As opposed to what?

[TVU]

"As opposed to what?"

SLES as in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server that's used by the SuperMUC supercomputer at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Garching, Bavaria, HPE's Cray supercomputers also use a customised variant of SLES plus a handful have used Ubuntu.

Assorted flavours of Unix used to completely dominate the supercomputer operating scene but that all started to change in 1998 when Linux started to eat into Unix's market share. Now all the top 500 supercomputers on the planet all use Linux of one form or another.

[Robert Sneddon]

No mention

...in the press report what processor family will be deployed in the BullSequana system Edinburgh Uni is getting for DiRAC. The PDF linked in TFA suggests the engineering chassis, interconnect and cooling solution is processor-agnostic so it may not be AMD Epyc blades that are chosen for this project.

[Potemkine!]

Time running out for secrets of cosmos to remain hidden

I rather think the opposite: each time we find an answer it creates plenty of new questions. The more we know, the more we realize we have a lot more to discover.

[Ken G]

Apologies to friends working for Atos but I don't think any of them are hiding "the secrets of the universe". Luxembourg is getting the same tin from Atos via the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking;

https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/news/meluxina-new-eurohpc-world-class-supercomputer-luxembourg