Bull NovaScale® systems run CD-adapco’s STAR-CD simulation software

Dresden, June 28, 2006.

CD-adapco and Bull have cooperated to offer the world renowned CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) solution STAR-CD on Bull’s most innovative Intel® Itanium® 2 based NovaScale servers and clusters.

STAR-CD software is designed for engineers and researchers working in the field of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and provides flow, thermal, and stress solutions in areas like automotive and aerospace aerodynamics, simulations of engine combustion, offshore/marine applications, or any other type of complex but important flow analysis. The STAR-CD solver provides one of the most effective numerical methodologies available in an industrial CFD code with the high level of accuracy needed for complex unstructured meshes. This power is delivered with the speed, efficiency and robustness demanded for practical engineering design and development cycles. Through a tight technical cooperation between Bull and CD-adapco’s expert teams, it has now been ported and optimized to fit Bull NovaScale servers and clusters and has successfully passed all certification criteria.

Dennis Nagy (pictured), Vice-President of Marketing and Business Development at CD-adapco, said: “CD-adapco welcomes Bull as a new partner to support our industry-standard STAR-CD simulation solution. CFD is poised to make an even more significant strategic business impact than heretofore by allowing development engineers to do ‘up-front’ what-if studies and optimization of key components and systems. CFD is very computationally intensive but scales very well on HPC clusters. As clusters such as Bull NovaScale become more powerful and cost-effective, and as CFD methods get significantly faster (e.g., via CD-adapco's introduction of breakthrough polyhedral meshing/solving technology), the execution speed of meaningful simulations is now within the timeframe needed by product developers to gain meaningful insight into innovative ‘outside-the-box’ new product concepts that previously were too risky to even consider as their chosen new product designs.”

Bull NovaScale servers are SMP (Symmetrical Multi-Processor) systems built using modular blocks that can be easily combined in a single cabinet to provide SMP servers from 2 to 32 sockets. They can be further extended with industry standard interconnects like Quadrics or InfiniBand into powerful clusters. Bull NovaScale systems have already a very strong presence in the Research and Academic sectors with outstanding successes like Europe’s most powerful supercomputer and fifth in the world installed at CEA, and is now entering the industry and manufacturing sectors with leading Independent Software Vendors (ISV) partners like CD-adapco.

Jean-Francois Lavignon, Director of the Bull HPC Business Unit, said:  “Bull is extremely pleased that CD-adapco has certified STAR-CD on our NovaScale platform making it a key addition to the growing portfolio of MCAE applications that take advantage of our servers and clusters capabilities. We already have installed customers like Pininfarina using STAR-CD on Bull NovaScale servers, and the floating point power of the Intel® Itanium®2 processor, the outstanding I/O capabilities and the scalability of the NovaScale line of servers and clusters will ideally complement STAR-CD software functionalities to offer to our industry partners a winning combination”

About Bull, Architect of an Open World™

As one of the leading European IT companies, Bull delivers open, flexible and secure information systems. The group helps public and private sector customers transform their information systems, applying its know-how and expertise in three main areas:

1. Capitalizing on its extensive mainframe experience, Bull designs and produces robust, innovative and open servers, based on industry-standard technologies;

2. Building on its alliances with leading ISVs and long-standing involvement with Open Source, Bull develops and implements flexible and interoperable application infrastructures which give business processes the freedom to evolve;

3. Bringing together recognized expertise in end-to-end IT security, Bull secures data and exchanges that are so critical in preserving customers’ business integrity.

Bull has a particularly strong presence in the public, healthcare, finance, telecommunications, manufacturing and defense sectors. Its distribution network and business partners cover more than 60 countries worldwide.
For more information visit: http://www.bull.com