Total R&D in Pau: a computer calculation center of 8,000 sqft. powering some 20 teraflops
Yesterday, Total, an oil company, invited 65 of my university classmates, including me, in Pau, in the Pyrenées, Southern-West France.
Total is by far the biggest French company, represents in market cap about 14% of the CAC40, a stockmarket index made of the 40 biggest companies by market capitalization.
We didn’t visit it, but were told that just in Pau, Total was hosting an 8,000 square feet computer calculation center representing some 20 teraflops of calculation power (a flop being a floating point operation).
Oil companies heavily investing in IT infrastructure is a no-brainer: the ability to map the ground faster for explorational purposes definitely helps foster a competitive advantage.
Sorry guys, no nice picture of the research center from the inside: pictures were not allowed and will never be so.
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Le Figaro published an interesting article on november 15th on the worldwide race on teraflops underlining the 7th place of France’s military owned system at Bruyères-le-Châtel. But they also notify that 308 of the world’s top 500 supercomputers are still running in the US.
Have a short look on http://www.top500.org showing the recent evolution of the battle for the first place. Also compare China’s position in june 2000 (no machine in the top 500) with its 4th place (ex aequo with Germany) in november 2006 with a count of 18 machines.
Thanks Rup, very interesting link. China has made quite an impressive breakthrough indeed.
To complement your comment, I’d like to mention that half of the world’s Cray supercomputers belong to the National Security Agency (NSA).