DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, July 01st 2006 - Intel Corporation today announced that its latest Intel Itanium 2 processor powers Europe's fastest supercomputer.  Intel has congratulated CEA and Bull on building Tera 10, a more than 50 teraflops peak (50 trillion floating point operations per second) system that boosts the European-record speed to 42.9 teraflops obtained on the LINPACK benchmark.

The fastest European Supercomputer

The TERA-10 system features the power of 4352 Intel Itanium 2

processors codenamed Montecito. The 544 Bull NovaScale* 6160 computing nodes, each including eight dual-core processors are dedicated solely to data processing. The TERA-10 supercomputer is dedicated to the CEA Simulation defense program which aims to guarantee the safety and the reliability of French nuclear deterrent. CEA is involved in setting up collaborative projects with many partners around the world.

The Intel Itanium processor family was designed for applications benefiting from large memory cache sizes and superior compute parallelism capabilities. The EPIC* instruction set for these processors takes the recent and future developments in microprocessor architectures into account, resulting in exceptional floating-point performance. Montecito, the next generation Itanium processor will be released this summer featuring dual-core technology, nearly 3x cache size and 4x thread count, plus Intel Virtualization Technology. This processor will deliver 2x the performance, 2.5x power efficiency improvement and increased cache reliability over the previous generation.

Intel's Leadership in High Performance Computing

Intel-based systems hold three of the top ten spots on the TOP500 list.  In addition to the CEA system in the fifth position, Intel processors power systems at the NASA/Ames Research Center (fourth place), and Sandia National Laboratories (sixth place). Overall, Intel microprocessors power over 60% of the Top500 systems. The result of the TOP500 list shows Intel's leadership in high performance computing.

The results of the TOP500 Supercomputer list were published at the ISC2006 Conference on June 28th 2006 in Dresden. The complete report is available at www.top500.org.

As one of the leading European IT companies, Bull delivers open, flexible and secure information systems. Capitalizing on its extensive mainframe experience, and its expertise as an Architect of an Open World*, Bull designs and produces robust, innovative and open servers, based on industry-standard technologies; among them are the NovaScale series.  For more information: http://www.bull.com

The CEA (Commissariat l'nergie atomique) is a prominent player in French research, development and innovation.  This French agency, which has about 15000 employees, is active in three broad areas: energy, healthcare and information technology, and defence and security. Excellence in basic research underpins its activities. Web site: www.cea.fr

Intel, the world leader in silicon innovation, develops technologies, products and initiatives to continually advance how people work and live. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com/pressroom.  

-Ends-

Contact:
Nawras Sawsou,
Intel Corporation                       
Tel: +971 4 224 711                              
E-Mail: nawras.sawsou@intel.com   

2006 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved.

*Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon, and Itanium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. NovaScale and Architect of an Open World are registered trademarks of Bull. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

© Press Release 2006