Italy enters the top 5 of the most powerful supercomputers in the world

With a capacity of 250 trillion operations per secondthe supercomputer Leonardo del Tecnopolo di Bologna should raise Italy in the fifth position in the ranking Top500 of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The machine, part of the project Euro Hpc (high performance computing) promoted by the European Commission and participated by 32 states and private companies, is managed by Cinecathe Italian inter-university consortium for automatic calculation to which 67 universities, 9 research institutions, three polyclinics and the Ministry of Education, from which it is controlled, belong.

Leonardo cost approx 240 million euros, coming from joint funding from the European Commission, the Italian Ministry of Education and the project partners (the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, the International Higher School of Advanced Studies of Trieste, Austria, Slovakia, Slovenia and Hungary) . Once operational, probably by the end of 2022, it will have one computing power ten times higher than the Marconi 100Cineca’s current high-end supercomputer, present at the twenty-first position of the Top500.

Designed, developed, manufactured and tested in Europe, the supercomputer built by Atos will provide Italian and Euro Hpc researchers with a modern infrastructure capable of ensuring maximum performance for the computation, data processing, high-performance data analysis, artificial intelligence and the development of machine learning models. With its 250 trillion operations per second computing capacity and 100 petabytes of storage, it will push the boundaries of traditional simulations and explore new applications, accelerating transformation and innovation.

The computer will be built in the Bologna Technopole, where about half of the components needed to make it have already arrived. It is about 5,000 servers and 157 racks (or rack, for the physical installation of hardware components), for a total of 360 thousand kilos of weight, plus hundreds of kilometers of cables. The National Supercomputing Center (Csc), one of the five centers envisaged by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan to increase the research and development capacity of the sector in Italy.