CS, a designer and integrator of critical systems for security and defense, space, aeronautics and energy, announced they just signed a partnership agreement with Cray. Both commercially and technologically, this alliance extends Cray’s reach into the French market while also allowing CS to grow in supercomputing, an area where its presence has been mostly limited to exploiting LaBS, a simulation solver developed in cooperation with Airbus and Renault.

One can’t help but look at this agreement as a response to the takeover bid launched last month by Atos for Bull in order to establish the resulting entity as a prominent force in the Cloud and Big Data markets in both France and Europe – two fast-growing markets regarded as highly strategic by public authorities.

Another sign of CS’s effort to strengthen its HPC offering is its entrance into NVIDIA’s TPP (Tesla Preferred Partner) program. The certification, reserved for an elite group of OEMs and added-value integrators, gives access to logistical and technical support resources that really make a difference for GPU acceleration solutions. Another (big) kid on the block, is this a sign that the market is ready to take off again after several quarters of stagnation?