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Leonardo, Eni and more work on the Italian supercomputer network

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Leonardo, Eni and more work on the Italian supercomputer network

Providing Italy with a network of supercomputers: this is the project of the consortium led by Infn, the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, with Cineca and Iit-Italian Institute of Technology together with Eni and Leonardo in the front row

An Italian federation to network supercomputers Marconi, Leonardo, Hpc5, davinci-1 and Franklin.

It is the project of the consortium led by Infn, the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, with Cineca and Iit-Italian Institute of Technology and Eni and Leonardo in the front row.

As Il Sole 24 Ore explains, "the consortium, which includes research centers, including Infn, which is its leader, and 15 major industrial partners (among which Autostrade, Fs, Engineering, ThalesAlenia, Fincantieri, Terna, Sogei are also , Humanitas, Upmc, Fiu, Ifab, Intesa Sanpaolo and Unipol Sai) filed the proposal, responding to a call from the Ministry of University and Research in the Pnrr field. The call for tenders relates to the creation of five national centers dedicated to frontier research in the "digital" field that refer to the mobility, agritech, medicine, biodiversity and supercomputing sectors ".

"On the network, in addition to the supercomputers named, there will be the machines of the national Infn centers, explains Antonio Zoccoli, president of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, and those of other data centers throughout the country: a total of about twenty" the newspaper underlines confindustrial.

All the details.

THE PROJECT OF THE NATIONAL CENTER FOR HPC, BIG DATA AND QUANTUM COMPUTING

“We presented at the Mur, as part of the PNRR, an ambitious project for the construction of a National Center for HPC (High performance computing), Big Data and Quantum Computing. The goal is to equip our country with a large infrastructure for supercomputing, artificial intelligence and Big Data. The project, of which the Infn is the leader, involves 25 Italian universities, 9 public research institutions, 15 private partners and aims to create the large National Center at the Bologna Technopole, the president of Infn Zoccoli announced on Twitter in February. .

RESOURCES

The resources foreseen by the NRP for the sector are between 300 and 400 million euros.

“Of the approximately 400 million that, from the NRP, will be able to reach the project,“ at least 10%, that is 40 million – explains Zoccoli to the Sole 24 Ore – will be dedicated to projects to be developed together with the industrial subjects participating in the Center. Another 40 will be assigned with external calls, addressed both to research institutions and universities and to other industrial entities. SMEs can be included thanks to the Ifab Foundation, which is a member of the Center and will act as a bridge for them. In short, this network, which was created for research, will also provide services to companies. And each company will have its own resources, which it can make available or not, depending on what its policies are in this field. It is a challenge: if we manage to make everything work, we will place Italy in a leadership position "in the field of the use of supercomputers and big data".

THE HEADQUARTERS AT THE TECNOPOLO DI BOLOGNA

Therefore the venue chosen to host the National Center for Hpc is the Bologna Technopole (in an advanced stage of construction ). The latter will host both the Data Center of the European Weather Center and the new Leonardo supercomputer, managed by Cineca (Interuniversity Research Consortium) and Infn.

THE NATIONAL SUPERCOMPUTER NETWORK

At the center of the project, therefore, will be the creation of a national network of supercomputers, "able to represent the infrastructure on which all Italian digital services are based, from big data to quantum computing and the cloud, on which it has a Leonardo's particular specialization ”underlines the Confindustria newspaper.

"We intend to create a federation, at national level, among super computing machines, so that they can be used together in case of emergencies" , Carlo Cavazzoni, head of the Leonardo Lab dedicated to HPC (High Performance Computing) last December.

«In this way – added the head of High performance computing -, there will be the possibility of having all the existing computing power on the national territory. Thanks to software technologies, linked to cloud computing, in principle it will be possible to federate the machines, for example, of Cineca, Eni and Leonardo and let them run applications that will respond to systemic crises ".

For this reason, they will be connected to each other to manage particularly serious events "such as pandemics – explained Cavazzoni di Leonardo, with a view to seeking a potential cure, or something else, such as hacker attacks on strategic digital infrastructures".

WHAT ARE THE ITALIAN SUPERCOMPUTERS

Finally, the initial computation power will already be extraordinary: "300 petaflops, where one petflop corresponds to one million billion operations per second" highlights the Sun.

The supercomputer federation will include Cineca's Marconi (25 petaflops) and Leonardo (250 petaflops); Leonardo, co-financed by the Italian government and the EU, resulting from the Europ Hpc project; Eni's Hpc4 and Hpc5 (50 petaflops); the Franklin (2 petaflops) of the Iit-Italian Institute of Technology and the davinci-1 (5 petaflops, with cloud architecture for all the evolving capacity) of Leonardo.

Leonardo's new supercomputer, installed in the Fiumara Tower in Genoa, with a battery of over 100 supercomputing units, for a total power exceeding 5PFlops – 5 million billion floating point operations per second, thanks to a high-performance network and a storage system made by DDN, is equipped with the latest hardware and software technologies, for a storage capacity of the order of 20Pbytes (20 million Gigabytes).

The Piazza Monte Grappa company has invested 8 million euros in the supercomputer. Furthermore, da-vinci has already won an honorable mention among the 100 supercomputers on the planet.

THE TARGET

Finally, "The National Center will focus – explains Il Sole 24 Ore -, on the one hand, on the maintenance and strengthening of Hpc infrastructures, on the other on the development of advanced numerical methods and applications and software tools, for a capillary exploitation of potential of digital in research but also in the industrial sector and for the evolution of services to citizens, starting with health and mobility. The areas of application, in fact, range from climate to safeguarding the territory and space, from engineering to materials science, from laboratories to precision medicine, from advanced mobility to smart cities ".

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/leonardo-eni-e-non-solo-lavorano-alla-rete-italiana-di-supercomputer/ on Thu, 19 May 2022 13:24:06 +0000.