EuroPAM 2006 Toulouse, Paris, France October 10, 2006 - Bull and ESI Group (ESIN FR0004110310) announce a partnership agreement to validate the leading crash simulation application, PAM-CRASH on Bull NovaScale servers and Bull NovaScale clusters. This agreement will be completed by the full validation of ESI Group’s simulation solutions on Bull NovaScale servers.

Benefiting from the close cooperation between ESI Group and Bull technical experts, full scale tests of car to car crashes (a 2 Million element model of a Neon car) have been modelled and simulated on a NovaScale cluster of 128 Intel Itanium®2 processors.

These tests have shown a very high level of performance and scalability with a reported 89% efficiency on 64 processors and more than 78% efficiency on the full 128, thus enabling critically important overnight restitution times for the highly detailed models that are today required in the automotive industry.

Bull and ESI Group R&D teams also cooperate on FAME2, one of the leading projects of the ‘competitiveness cluster System@tic ’. They contribute to enhance the scalability levels of ESI Group’s industry solutions on NovaScale systems, in order to allow the industrial usage of even more detailed models. Ultimately, this work will allow car vendors to add more security enhancements in the design of new car models without impacting their budget and their time-to-market requirements.

Bull’s HPC solutions are built using the two Bull NovaScale® server families: NovaScale® Intensive, based on Intel® Itanium® 2 dual-core processors, and NovaScale® Universal, based on Intel® Xeon® dual-core processors. NovaScale servers combine significant processing power with the cost optimization that comes from using industry standard components, and build on Bull’s long­standing expertise in major corporate IT systems. From entry-level to high-end models, NovaScale® servers can go up to 32 sockets. They are specifically designed to be integrated into even the largest and most complex of computing infrastructures. The diversity of the range means it is possible to build a tailored platform that is perfectly adapted to support any application.

Vincent Chaillou, President and Chief Operating Officer, Product Operations ESI Group declares “ESI Group welcomes Bull as a new hardware partner, the availability of PAM-CRASH on NovaScale will offer our customers an attractive choice to run their crash simulations. We are particularly pleased to work with a European hardware company to support our local users for system integration with their excellent performance and large experience.”

Jean-Francois Lavignon, General Manager of the Bull HPC Business Unit says: “Bull is extremely pleased that ESI Group has certified PAM-CRASH on our NovaScale platform, making it a key addition to the growing portfolio of Mechanical Computer Aided Engineering applications that take advantage of our servers and clusters capabilities. Some prestigious customers are already using PAM-CRASH on Bull NovaScale servers. Our customers will be able to take advantage of ESI industry solutions on the whole range of Bull NovaScale platforms with the choice between the Intel® Itanium®2 and Xeon® double core processors”

About Bull, Architect of an Open World 

As one of the leading European IT companies, Bull delivers open, flexible and secure information systems. The group helps public and private sector customers transform their information systems, applying its know-how and expertise in three main areas:

Capitalizing on its extensive mainframe experience, Bull designs and produces robust, innovative and open servers, based on industry-standard technologies;

Building on its alliances with leading ISVs, Bull develops and implements flexible and interoperable application infrastructures which give business processes the freedom to evolve;

Bringing together recognized expertise in end-to-end IT security, Bull secures data and exchanges that are so critical in preserving customers' business integrity.

Bull has a particularly strong presence in the public, healthcare, finance, telecommunications, manufacturing and defence sectors. Its distribution network and business partners cover more than 60 countries worldwide.
For more information visit: http://www.bull.com

About ESI Group

ESI Group is a world-leading supplier, and a pioneer of digital simulation software for prototyping and manufacturing processes that take into account the physics of materials. ESI Group has developed an extensive suite of coherent, industry oriented applications to realistically simulate a product’s behavior during testing, to fine-tune manufacturing processes in accordance with desired product performance, and evaluate the environment’s impact on product performance. ESI Group’s products, which have a proven track record in manufacturing and have been combined in multi-trade value chains, represent a unique collaborative and open virtual engineering solution known as the Virtual Try-Out Space (VTOS), enabling virtual prototypes to be improved in a continuous and collaborative manner. This integrated protocol allows all the company’s solutions to work with each other and with applications developed by independent software vendors. By significantly reducing costs and development lead times and enabling product/process synergies, VTOS solutions offer major competitive advantage by progressively eliminating the need for physical prototypes during product development. The company generated sales of €62.2m in 2005, employs over 500 high-level specialists worldwide covering more than 30 countries. ESI Group is listed in Eurolist compartment C of Euronext Paris. For further information, visit www.esi-group.com.

Virtual Try-Out Space® and VTOS® are registered trademarks of ESI Group. All other products, names or companies are the brands or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

Press Contacts

Anne-Marie Jourdain
BULL – Press Relations
Phone: +33(0)1 30 80 32 52
E-mail: anne-marie.jourdain@bull.net

Nathalie David-Franc
ESI Group - Press Relations
Phone : + 33 (0)1 41 73 58 35
E-mail : nathalie.david-franc@esi-group.com