TERA-10 is a supercomputer

Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...

 built by Bull SA

Groupe Bull

-External links:* * — Friends, co-workers and former employees of Bull and Honeywell* *...

 for the French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique

Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique

The Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives or CEA, is a French “public establishment related to industrial and commercial activities” whose mission is to develop all applications of nuclear power, both civilian and military...

, (Atomic Energy Commission).

According to the TOP500

TOP500

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year...

 list (as of November 2010), it is currently the 142nd fastest computer in the world running at 52.84 teraFLOPs

FLOPS

In computing, FLOPS is a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations, similar to the older, simpler, instructions per second...

 (52.84 trillion floating point

Floating point

In computing, floating point describes a method of representing real numbers in a way that can support a wide range of values. Numbers are, in general, represented approximately to a fixed number of significant digits and scaled using an exponent. The base for the scaling is normally 2, 10 or 16...

 calculations per second) using nearly 10,000 processor cores (in about 4800 dual-core processors). It runs the Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 operating system, with an SMP kernel specially modified to handle very large symmetric clusters currently cadenced by a 8-processors central system.

Its main application is the simulation of atomic experiences and the maintenance of the French nuclear defence force, using the results of true nuclear tests (between 1956 and 1995, most of them in the French Nuclear Test Plant in the Pacific) and the new results obtained from the LMJ(Laser Mega-Joule) built in continental France.

Evolution

This is the end of a second generation of evolutions, the next generation will reach about 100 TeraFLOPS (expected in 2009) using processors with more internal cores and a new central scheduling system allowing asymmetric operation on a variable number of processors, for easier upgrades, lower maintenance cost, and more experiences requiring different computing scales, without having to rebuild the whole cluster. This new system should be renamed Tera-100.