First it was Météo France, announced in March, now it’s the German Climate Computing Centre’s (DKRZ) turn to choose a Bull supercomputer for renewing its main system, to enter production stage by 2016. This 26 M€ contract provisions for not only a 3 Pflops machine but also expert services for optimizing parallel code at the Grenoble center of excellence. This machine will replace the aging IBM Power6-based Blizzard computer (158 Tflops).

Using water cooling for more energy efficiency, the system boasts a politically correct PUE of 1.2. It will be accompanied by a storage capacity of 45 petabytes based on Lustre, which should make this computer one of the first machines in the world in terms of size of its file system.