Bull is the trusted partner for enterprise data. The Group, which is firmly established in the Cloud and in Big Data, integrates and manages high- performance systems (including high end HPC Clusters) and end-to-end security solutions. Bull’s offerings enable its customers to process all the data at their disposal, creating new types of demand. Bull converts data into value for organizations in a completely secure manner. Bull currently employs around 9,200 people across more than 50 countries, with over 700 staff totally focused on R&D. In 2013, Bull recorded revenues of €1.3 billion with a particularly strong presence in the public, healthcare, finance, telecommunications, manufacturing and defence sectors.
Closely attuned to changes in technology and business, Bull R&D is involved in all key areas of the Group’s activities: high-performance computing, cyber-security, Cloud computing, information systems modernization, Big Data. In recent years, the Bull R&D labs have developed many major products that are recognized for their originality and quality. These include the bullx supercomputer offer (with several references in the TOP500), bullion servers for the private Clouds and Big Data, the Shadow intelligent jamming system designed to counter RCIEDs, the libertp tool for modernization of legacy applications and, most recently, hoox, the first European smartphone featuring native security. To explore new areas and develop tomorrow’s solutions, today, Bull R&D is investing heavily in customers – with whom it has forged many successful technological partnerships – as well as in institutional collaborative programs (such as competitiveness clusters and European projects) and in partnerships with industry (Open Source, consortiums).
Bull will be heavily involved in Task 2.6: Upscaling of CompBioMed Production Applications for Future HPC Platforms and in WP4: Innovation and Sustainability. Bull intends to provide access to an “on-demand” HPC production infrastructure with dedicated portal, and provide expertise. They will contribute to best practices recommendations for efficient resource usage and solution upscaling toward the exascale. They will also contribute to (Big) Data management aspects of the project (Task 5.5 Integrating Compute and Data Infrastructure).
Key Personnel
Dr Xavier Vigouroux – After a PhD from Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon in distributed computing, worked for several major companies in different positions. He has now been working for Bull for 9 years. He led the HPC benchmarking team for the first five years, then in charge of the “Education and Research” market for HPC at Bull, he is now managing the “Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming” (CEPP) of Bull. These CEPP activities focus on tackling issues in HPC application Performance.
Myrtille Deldossi – Artificial Intelligence Project Manager in the “Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming” of Bull, an Atos Company. A first M.S degree in Cognitive Sciences at Institut National Polytechniques of Grenoble and a second one in Computational Linguistic at University Paris 4 –La Sorbonne. Worked for various company in different positions since 2004: consulting (junior and senior profile), Research and Development, focusing on Opinion Mining automatic detection in documents. As Innovation Project Manager, she led a team for 3 years and been in charge of a various innovation projects that involve Text Mining technologies in various areas as Life Science, Defense, Publishing, etc..
Dr Erwan Raffin – Obtained his PhD degree in computer science in 2011 from the University of Rennes, France in the framework of collaboration between Technicolor and the INRIA/IRISA laboratory. During his PhD, he has focused his research on compilation and synthesis aspects of multimedia application acceleration on coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures using constraint programming. From 2011 to 2014, he was a research and development engineer at CAPS enterprise, which developed and commercialised innovative software for high performance application tuning in the domains of HPC. He then worked at INSA Rennes, IETR, UMR CNRS 6164, UEB in the Image Group as a research engineer on low power video decoder. He joined the Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming (CEPP) of Bull in 2016 focusing on Weather and Climate community and its HPC application domain.