{"id":593663,"date":"2026-05-20T03:18:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T03:18:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/593663\/"},"modified":"2026-05-20T03:18:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T03:18:17","slug":"airbus-gets-hpc-as-a-service-supercomputer-from-bull","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/593663\/","title":{"rendered":"Airbus gets HPC-as-a-service supercomputer from Bull"},"content":{"rendered":"

HPC<\/a><\/p>\n

Aerospace giant rents new system over 5 years to help develop new aircraft<\/p>\n

Airbus has inaugurated new supercomputing infrastructure from
\nBull to help the firm develop future aircraft, but is being coy about revealing how
\npowerful the overall system is.<\/p>\n

The European aerospace giant had already taken delivery of
\nthe hardware, spread across two sites \u2013 at Toulouse in December last year and Hamburg
\nin April this year \u2013 but today (Tuesday) marks the official inauguration of the
\nsystem, with 3x the performance of its previous supercomputer.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s according to Bull, the high-performance compute biz the French state<\/a>\u00a0acquired from Atos a few months ago,
\nas Airbus declined to put forward a spokesperson to answer our questions.<\/p>\n

The new system is based on a modular design, where kit was
\npre-assembled inside containers before being shipped to the Airbus sites. It is
\nbased on the firm\u2019s BullSequana XH3000<\/a>
\nrack infrastructure with a mix of compute blades configured with AMD\u2019s Genoa and Turin versions of the Epyc processors, plus Nvidia GPU blades. <\/p>\n

Also part of the hardware manifest is IBM Spectrum Scale storage
\nusing Storage Scale System appliances from the firm, and the interconnect used
\nis Nvidia\u2019s InfiniBand NDR (Next Data Rate), supporting 400 Gbps per port.<\/p>\n

However, Bull wouldn\u2019t tell us exactly how much of all this infrastructure
\nit has delivered, as Airbus regards this as confidential information.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What it did
\nsay is that the supercomputer is being supplied and supported on a \u201cHPC-as-a-service\u201d
\nmodel, whereby Airbus is paying close to \u20ac100 million ($116 million) over five years for
\nan all-inclusive deal.<\/p>\n

Bull is understood to have won this contract from HPE, which
\nwas the previous supplier to Airbus.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo Airbus was a long standing customer of HPE for around 24
\nyears, and they were initiating a procurement to replace their existing system
\nin order to get something like three times more performance of their existing
\nsystems, so they did a procurement, which is a classical HPC procurement, and
\nwe won on the price-performance agreement,\u201d Bull\u2019s head of HPC, AI and Quantum
\nComputing Bruno Lecointe told The Register.<\/p>\n

While the hardware is located at two sites, Lecointe says
\nthey are connected to function as a single supercomputer, although workloads
\nare not currently split across sites but run on one or the other, with a batch
\nscheduler choosing which is the best based on the available resources.<\/p>\n

Airbus needed a more powerful supercomputer as it is
\nexpecting to use it for \u201cdigital twins,\u201d whereby the helicopters and other
\naircraft it is developing will not only be designed using the system, but the
\nentire airframe will also be simulated on the computer as well.<\/p>\n

One of the tools it is likely to be using is the CODA computational
\nfluid dynamics (CFD) software, jointly developed by the German Aerospace Center
\n(DLR), the French Aerospace Lab (ONERA), and Airbus itself.<\/p>\n

Lecointe hinted that Bull is also working with Airbus on
\nsome quantum and AI algorithms to meet its compute requirements, but this is \u201chighly
\nconfidential.\u201d<\/p>\n

The inauguration of this fully operational, multi-site
\nsupercomputing infrastructure comes just 14 months after contract signature, Lecointe
\nboasted. The heat generated by the system will also be reused to supply
\nneighboring buildings on the Airbus site. \u00ae <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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