Dresden, Germany, June 26, 2007 - Bull and Platform Computing announced today that they have signed a worldwide agreement for the availability of Platform LSF on Bull’s NovaScale® High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters.

Under the terms of this partnership, Platform LSF, the leading workload manager for distributed computing environments is available on both Intel® Xeon® based Bull NovaScale Cluster 400 and Intel® Itanium® based Bull NovaScale Cluster 3000. The Platform LSF family of products is fully integrated with Bull Advanced Software (BAS), to help users manage and optimize complex IT environments delivering higher IT efficiency, dramatically reduced cost of computing and guaranteed service execution.

IT infrastructure and computing capacity are critical to the efficiency of HPC computer centres in Research, Education or Industry. This has been recognized by the ‘Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique’ (CEA) has been using Platform LSF for a long time to manage the workload of compute jobs running on two of the largest European computers.

"CEA has been using Platform LSF software in its computing centre for a number of years and we decided to keep it as a batch management system when we replaced its computers in 2005 and 2006. Our motivations to renew our confidence in this product are multiple. It was of course intended to leverage and capitalize on past invested experience with this operation tightly coupled tool," said Hervé Lozach, Head of Scientific Computing and Networking Service, CEA. "The software maturity, its compatibility with a variety of architectures, are also strong points of Platform LSF. In our case, it also fits with the Quadrics/RMS resource manager for TERA as well as the SLURM CCRT batch management needs."

"Platform LSF is the perfect complement to Bull’s NovaScale HPC Solutions." said Christoph Reichert, Vice President HPC Sales, EMEA, Platform Computing. "With the speed and reliability LSF provides, Bull customers can look forward to implementing a faster, more efficient HPC solution in a timely manner without incurring prohibitive financial costs."

Bull NovaScale Clusters are pre-configured, turnkey solutions tuned to deliver maximum performance

While significantly reducing TCO, Bull NovaScale Clusters also offer optimal flexibility and modularity, to match customer exact requirements. They are available in a wide range of configuration sizes, and offer a broad choice of options for processors, interconnects, and operating environments. The BAS (Bull Advanced Server) software suite for HPC environments is built on top of standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 or 5. This integrated and comprehensive package, designed by Bull, includes the best of Open Source and industry-standard software, together with specific features developed by Bull for high-performance computing clusters. BAS includes comprehensive management tools to allow an entire cluster, including the platform and interconnect network, to be as easily monitored and managed as a single system.

"We have a great history working with Platform Computing and have achieved significant successes together," said Benoît Hallez, Director of Bull HPC Business Unit. "This agreement will strengthen our collaboration, and will benefit our customers in their continuous quest for optimizing their cluster resources usage."

About Platform Computing
Platform Computing is the leading systems infrastructure software company that accelerates applications and delivers IT agility for increased business performance and reduced cost. Founded in 1992, Platform is a pioneer in HPC, Cluster and Grid Computing technologies. Platform has over 2000 global customers, and the industry's broadest support for third-party applications. For more information, please visit www.platform.com"

 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:

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

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