This is what the Leonardo-Finmeccanica super computer will be for
All the details on Leonardo's super computer
The countdown has now started. Italy will soon have one of the most powerful computers in the world . It has already been renamed supercomputer of Genoa, the one that will be installed in the Ligurian capital starting next October 15th. Leonardo's mega-computer (formerly Finmeccanica) will be the nerve center of the Genoese headquarters of Leonardo Labs, the new corporate research and development laboratories dedicated to innovation in Leonardo's traditional sectors and to the development of new technologies for the long term. "The Labs – let the group know – are springing up near the main industrial sites of Leonardo in Italy and abroad with the aim of facilitating technology transfer and maximizing the benefits for the reference territories, consolidating the collaboration with local institutions ".
STAFF SELECTION CONTINUES
Leonardo is continuing the selection of 68 young talents who will be included in six specific research areas (Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Intelligent System, Big Data Analytics, High Performance Computing, Electrification of Aeronautical Platforms, Materials and Structures and Quantum Technologies) and who will be part of teams being set up in the six Labs offices, present, as well as in Liguria where the Genoa supercomputer will be based, in the areas of Milan, Turin, Rome, Naples and Taranto. For those sixty-eight positions, over 900 applications have already arrived that the Group is now skimming. "The new laboratories will allow to feed a continuous flow of talents to ensure flexibility and renewal, both of skills and professional skills, based on a model adopted on an international scale in which young external researchers of international origin will work together with experts and researchers within Leonardo's Divisions ”. As in the days of the discovery of America, Genoa returns to the forefront of technical and scientific progress. The Christopher Columbus of the situation will be Roberto Cingolani , for 14 years number 1 of the Italian Institute of Technology (Iit) and today in charge of Leonardo's technological innovation.
THE GENOA SUPERCOMPUTER
Leonardo's super computer will be located in the former sixteen-storey tower of the group in Genoa which until a few years ago housed the Selex headquarters (subsidiary of the former Finmeccanica), in the Fiumara area. It will not be completed before autumn 2020 and, if the road map is respected smoothly, the first ignition is expected by the end of 2020. "The car must have 10-20 peta bytes to start," explained Cingolani some time ago. We are in the order of magnitude, that is, billions of bytes. "From the point of view of calculation, flops are normally used", added Leonardo's head of technological innovation, the former Finmeccanica group: "This will be a supercomputer that will make many peta flops", or a billion billion operations per second. “By now – he explained when announcing the project – the worldwide trend is to make exaflop machines (trillions of operations per second), which are not yet reached. If one makes dozens of peta flops, he begins to join the ranks of the greats ”. And the Ligurian supercomputer will be a monster with hardware between 10 and 20 betabytes of computing power.
SOME NUMBERS OF THE GENOA SUPERCOMPUTER
The new computing center will be one of the first in Europe, and the first in Italy, to be equipped with the latest generation NVidia A100 accelerators. The supercomputer will count on a battery of over one hundred supercomputing units, for a total computing power exceeding 5PFlops (5 million billion floating point operations per second), connected by a high-performance network and a storage system equipped with latest hardware and software technologies, for a storage capacity of the order of 20Pbytes (20 million Gigabytes).
ITALY AMONG THE TOP FIVE NATIONS IN THE WORLD
“The super computer we are developing in Genoa will significantly strengthen the capabilities of both the company and nationally in supercomputing, big data and autonomous and intelligent systems”, Alessandro Profumo , CEO of Leonardo said some time ago. “This project will significantly contribute to Italy's positioning among the top five nations in the world for computing capacity in the public and industrial research sectors”.
AN ALL EUROPEAN SUPERCOMPUTER
Another peculiarity of the Genoa super computer concerns the fact that, unlike what is happening with 5G, it will only exploit European technology. Leonardo has in fact chosen Atos , a French listed company specializing in digital transformation, as a technological partner for the development of the supercomputer in Genoa. Leonardo and Atos will also be able to collaborate on further research projects related to quantum computation.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/ecco-a-cosa-servira-il-super-computer-di-leonardo-finmeccanica/ on Sun, 04 Oct 2020 13:55:12 +0000.