Bull lands €40m contract for DKRZ HLRE-5 climate supercomputer

Bull has won a €40 million ($45m) contract to deliver HLRE-5, the next-generation supercomputer for DKRZ, the German Climate Computing Center in Hamburg. The five-year deal includes support services, and the system comes online in early 2028.

DKRZ says HLRE-5 will cut the energy required per simulated year by roughly 75 percent compared with its current machine, Levante. The system will run both physics-based simulations and AI-driven climate research.

What does the hardware look like?

HLRE-5 is based on Bull's XH3500 architecture and splits into two partitions: a GPU side powered by Nvidia GB200 Superchips and a CPU side running Nvidia Vera CPUs. Direct liquid cooling keeps the heat in check. Nvidia Quantum-2 InfiniBand handles node interconnects.

Storage comes from IBM Storage Scale System 6000:

• 60PB of high-capacity disk storage
• Up to 340 Gbps throughput
• A dedicated 500TB flash tier

A district heating setup will pipe the system's waste heat into the University of Hamburg.

"The new system will allow us to drastically reduce the energy needed for our users' climate simulations," said Dr. Hendryk Bockelmann, head of DKRZ's applications department. "For a center that exists to study the climate, that is not a side benefit – it is part of the job."

Dr. Martin Matzke, head of Northern and Central Europe at Bull, added: "We are proud to continue our long-standing collaboration with DKRZ, one of Europe's leading climate computing centers. HLRE-5 builds on years of joint innovation in energy-efficient supercomputing and demonstrates how advanced digital infrastructure can support excellent climate research."

What does this change for Bull?

The award lands six months after the French state completed its acquisition of Bull from Atos, its former HPC and quantum subsidiary, under a €404m ($469m) share purchase agreement signed in July 2025.

Bull's BullSequana line anchors several of the world's most powerful supercomputers. Its X-series architecture supports exascale-class machines, including Europe's first exascale system, the Jupiter Booster.

The DKRZ win extends a busy run:

• April 2026: a €30 million ($35m) five-year contract to supply AI-optimized infrastructure at Sweden's Mimer AI factory, also on the XH3500 architecture
• Selection by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) and the Lumi AI factory consortium to deliver the Lumi-AI supercomputer, hosted at the CSC data center in Kajaani, Finland
• A €31 million ($36m) contract with the Spanish State Meteorological Agency (AEMET) for supercomputing infrastructure

For DKRZ users, the payoff is throughput per watt: same simulations, a quarter of the energy. For Bull, it's proof the state-owned company can keep landing pan-European HPC deals post-acquisition.