Groupe Bull

Bull SAS

Type	Public
Traded as	Euronext: BULL
Industry	Computer hardware Computer software Consultant IT Services
Founded	1931
Founder(s)	Fredrik Rosing Bull
Headquarters	Les Clayes-sous-Bois, France
Area served	Worldwide
Website	Bull.com

Bull SAS (Euronext: BULL) (also known as Groupe Bull, Bull Information Systems, or simply Bull) is a French-owned computer company headquartered in Les Clayes-sous-Bois, in the western suburbs of Paris. The company has also been known at various times as Bull General Electric, Honeywell Bull, CII Honeywell Bull, and Bull HN. Bull was founded in 1931, as H.W. Egli - Bull, to capitalize on the punched card technology patents of Norwegian engineer Fredrik Rosing Bull (1882–1925). After a reorganization in 1933, with new owners coming in, the name was changed to Compagnie des Machines Bull.

The company has undergone many takeovers and mergers since its formation. In particular, it has had various ownership relations with General Electric, Honeywell, and NEC from the 1960s to the 1980s; and with Motorola, Debeka, and France Télécom more recently. It acquired Honeywell Information Systems in the late 1980s, and later also had a share of Zenith Data Systems and Packard Bell. Bull was nationalised in 1982 and was merged with most of the rest of the French computer industry. In 1994 the company was re-privatised.

Bull has a worldwide presence in more than 100 countries, and is particularly active in the defense, finance, health care, manufacturing, public and telecommunication sectors.

Recent major products of the company are the scalable Bull NovaScale family of Itanium 2-based servers for High Performance Computing and commercial applications and the high-availability Bull Escala family of IBM Power5-architecture servers. Bull also has a Bull DPS-9000 mainframe computer range (catering to long-time customers with Bull computer installations) and a blade server line. All new products are available with a distribution of Linux.

Bull also offers services, including IT consulting (from IT architecture and ‘urbanization’ to project management support), IT integration and IT operations.

The name

A 1990 Honeywell-Bull DPS 7 mainframe

The company is named after its original Norwegian founder, Fredrik Rosing Bull, whose name is pronounced, in French, as the fairly innocuous French word bulle (bubble), but is pronounced in English as the much less innocuous English word bull. Overcoming the potential negative connotations of this linguistic coincidence for advertising and marketing campaigns in English has been a continuing challenge for the company. However, it is debatable how much it matters to their particular clientele, in contrast to the marketing driven mainstream PC market.

List of computers produced by Bull

• Gamma 3 rekenautomaat
• Gamma 60 (1960)
• CAB500 (1962)
• Série 300 TI (1962)
• Gamma 30 (1964) (RCA 301)
• Gamma M 40 (1965)
• Gamma 10 (1966)
• GE 400 (1967)
• GE 115 (1966)
• GE 55 (1967)
• GE-265 (1968)
• CII Iris 50 (1970)
• CII Iris 60 (1972)
• CII Iris 80 (1972)
• CII Mitra 15 (1972)
• GE Multics (1968)
• GE 615 (1965)
• Honeywell H200 (1970)
• HB 2000 (1973)
• Micral (1973)
• Mini6 (1978)
• GE 58 (1970)
• CII HB 64/40 (1976)
• CII HB 66/60 (1976)
• CII HB 61 DPS (1978)
• Bull DPS4 (1980)
• Bull DPS7 and DPS 7000 (1981)
• SM 90 (1981)
• Correlative Syst. 1982
• SPS7 and SPS9
• DPX 2 (1992)
• Escala (1994)
• DPS 9000 (1999)
• NovaScale (2004)
• DS800 (2007)
• bullx (2009)^[1]
• novascale bullion (2010)

Machines at TOP500

As of November 2010 Bull has 9 machines at the TOP500 supercomputer list^[2]

Rank	Rmax Rpeak (Tflops)	Name	Computer Processor cores	Site Country, Year
6	1050 1254.55	Tera 100	Bull bullx super-node S6010/S6030 138368 (Nehalem-ex#Beckton), Infiniband	Commissariat à l'énergie atomique   France, 2010
23	274.80 308.28	JUROPA	Bull HPC-FF Supercomputer 26304 (Xeon), Infiniband	Jülich Research Centre   Germany, 2009
53	124.6 145.15	Blackthorn	Bull bullx B500 cluster 12936 (Westmere_(microarchitecture)#Westmere)	Atomic Weapons Establishment   United Kingdom, 2010
61	108.5 130	Titane	Bull Novascale R422-E2 11520 (Xeon)	Commissariat à l'énergie atomique   France, 2009
85	87.47 104.6	Layon	Bull bullx super-node S6010/S6030 11520 (Xeon)	Groupe Bull   France, 2010
86	57.47 104.42	Curie	Bull bullx super-node S6010 11520 (Nehalem-ex#Beckton)	Commissariat à l'énergie atomique   France, 2010
89	85.9 100.17	Cheops	Bull bullx Blade/Supernode 9376 (Xeon)	University of Cologne   Germany, 2010
142	52.84 63.795	Tera-10	Bull Novascale 5160 9968 (Itanium2), Quadrics	Commissariat à l'énergie atomique   France, 2006
225	42.13 49.15	Platine	Bull Novascale 3045 7680 (Itanium2), Infiniband	Commissariat à l'énergie atomique   France, 2007

References

1. ^ HPCwire.com
2. ^ Top500.org

Further reading

• Pierre E. Mounier-Kuhn (1998). "Bull: A World-Wide Company Born in Europe". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. pp. 279–297. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MAHC.1989.10045. Retrieved 2009-07-08. 

External links

• Bull corporate website
• Bull computers (German) — Friends, co-workers and former employees of Bull and Honeywell
• Bull computers in Belgium (French)
• Bull computers timeline, and info (French)