Maintained and operated by Bull in support of the international cooperation between Japan and Europe around the ITER project, the Helios supercomputer, installed at Rokkasho in Japan, will see its computing power increase from 1.5 Pflops to almost 2 Pflops by the addition of 180 new bullx B515 compute nodes, each containing two Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors.

Inaugurated in March 2012, Helios is available to European and Japanese researchers within the International Fusion Energy Research Center (IFERC) under the “Broader Approach” agreement, a supplementary research program of ITER. The aim is to harness nuclear fusion to provide a sustainable source of energy without emitting carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases.

Bull has been selected by the CEA (itself mandated by F4E, which coordinates the European contribution) to complete the installation of the machine and take care of its maintenance and operation for a period of five years. In regard to the technical specifications of Helios, aside from the 180 new nodes, it is equipped with 4,410 compute nodes, each incorporating two octo-core Intel Xeon E5-2600 (Sandy Bridge) processors, interconnected by an InfiniBand. It also features a 280 TB memory space and 5.7 PB of permanent storage.