What American Nvidia will do for the Leonardo supercomputer
The American Nvidia, together with the French Atos, will provide hardware for Leonardo, the European supercomputer powered by artificial intelligence
It will be the American Nvidia, together with the French Atos, to build the world-class supercomputer powered by artificial intelligence. This is the Leonardo system, managed by the Italian multi-university consortium Cineca, which will be installed at the Tecnopolo in Bologna.
On Thursday the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking EuroHpc, together with Cineca announced the two companies as suppliers.
Leonardo is expected to start processing data in 2021 and become fully operational in 2022. Once operational, Cineca will use Leonardo for a wide variety of research activities.
With its enormous computing power, which will allow it to perform more than 248 Petaflops or more than 248 million billion calculations per second, Leonardo will rank among the best supercomputers in the world . It will thus pave the way to the next frontier of supercomputing, performing more than one billion billion operations per second (exaflop).
All the details.
THE LEONARDO SUPERCOMERATOR
A machine 10 times faster than those currently in use in Europe, the fifth most powerful in the world. The supercomputer will be designed, developed, manufactured and tested in Europe. Based on Atos' Bull Sequana XH2000 technology, it will be equipped with 14,000 GPU-accelerated processors from Nvidia.
FRUIT OF EU AND MIUR FINANCING
As Il Sole 24 Ore recalled, “launched in 2018, the project is the result of a joint investment of 240 million euros: 120 million allocated by the European Commission and 120 million financed by Italy through the Ministry of University and Research. The Cineca consortium has been identified as a hosting entity for the data center in which to host the Leonardo computing system. Against an agreement between Miur, Cineca, Infn and Sissa and in synergy with the Emilia-Romagna Region, the Italian data valley, where 70% of the national computing power is already concentrated today ”.
THE FRENCH ATOS INVOLVED ALSO IN THE SUPERCOMPUTER OF LEONARDO (FORMER FINMECCANICA) IN GENOA
As Wired pointed out, “Atos, who will build Leonardo, has won two other contracts: Vega, the computer that it will build in Slovenia by March for 17.2 million, and Meluxina, the petascale machine in Luxembourg (30 million). All three will mount Ndivia's chips "
In addition, the aerospace and defense group Leonardo (formerly Finmeccanica) has chosen the French Atos as a technological partner for the development of the supercomputer that will be installed in Genoa, in one of the six Italian offices of Leonardo Labs.
THE EUROHPC CONSORTIUM
Returning to the Leonardo supercomputer, as we said at the beginning, the project is approved by EuroHpc, the European consortium which currently includes 32 member states.
The latter have allocated a total of 1.1 billion euros between 2019 and 2020, destined to reach 8 billion in the 2021-27 budget. In June 2019, EuroHpc selected eight supercomputing centers across the European Union to host EuroHpc's first eight systems.
WHAT THE SUPERCOMPUTER WILL BE USED FOR
Leonardo will allow Italian and European researchers to have a supercomputer comparable to those installed by the United States, China and Japan.
The applications of the supercomputer include the analysis of genomes and the discovery of new therapeutic pathways; addressing data from multiple different sources for space exploration and extraterrestrial planetary research as well as the development of meteorological models.
Thanks to Leonardo, therefore, researchers "will be able to identify strategies for mitigation and response to natural events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic events, hydrogeological assets and for the fight against pandemics", explained Cineca.
IN HELP AGAINST COVID-19
The supercomputer also represents a weapon to counter Covid-19. Cineca, with its current supercomputing machines, participates in the European project 'Escalate4CoV' to identify the molecules suitable for the preparation of new drugs for the treatment of coronavirus.
“With the supercomputer Leonardo, elements of knowledge are made available to the political decision maker in real time”. David Vannozzi, Cineca's general director underlined. "Precisely what is happening in the fight against Covid," with the isolation of a molecule capable of impacting the coronavirus spike protein, it is possible to repeat it in other fields as well ".
LEONARDO, ONE OF THE FIRST EUROPEAN SUPERCOMPUTERS
Leonardo will be one of four new supercomputers supported by a trans-European effort to advance high-performance computing capabilities in the region, which will ultimately offer advanced AI capabilities for processing both scientific and industrial applications.
Other computers in the cluster include MeluXina in Luxembourg and Vega in Slovenia, as well as a new unit arriving in the Czech Republic. The pan-European consortium also plans four other supercomputers for Bulgaria, Finland, Portugal and Spain; however, those will follow later and specifics regarding their performance and locations are not yet available.
BUILT BY US NVIDIA
Californian Nvidia, whose graphics cards are used extensively by the video game industry in particular, has seen its shares skyrocket after the coronavirus crisis that has boosted the market for chips used for PC games.
In recent times, Nvidia's market cap has soared to over $ 300 billion. Nvidia overtook Intel to become the world's most valuable chip maker in July. As already mentioned, Nvidia is also involved in the Slovenian Vega project and in the Luxembourgish Meluxina.
ALL OF NVIDIA'S LATEST ACHIEVEMENTS IN SUPER CALCULATION
But Leonardo, MelaXina, Vega are only the latest in a series of victories in supercomputing for Nvidia.
Last July, Nvidia announced a public-private partnership with the University of Florida to enhance the capabilities of the HiPerGator supercomputer with the company's DGX SuperPod architecture. The goal is to develop the fastest supercomputer in academia.
In October, the company announced plans to build a $ 52 million supercomputer in Cambridge, England . The supercomputer, called “Cambridge-1”, is intended for research on artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare.
Nvidia said Cambridge-1 will have 400 petaflops of "AI performance" and will rank in the top three most energy efficient supercomputers in the world.
THE ACQUISITION OF ARM BY SOFTBANK
The announcement of the "Cambridge-1" project comes just weeks after Nvidia said it plans to buy British rival Arm for $ 40 billion from SoftBank .
If approved, the takeover would give Nvidia a crucial advantage for the EU's exascale plans (capable of grinding one exaflop, one billion billion operations per second).
Between the acquisition of Arm and these new victories with EuroHpc, US Nvidia is trying to plant roots in European supercomputing.
But the sale of Arm to Nvidia "will raise an eyebrow" not only for British politicians. But also among the major global players in the semiconductor industry. Their partnerships with Arm could indeed be compromised, as the American group is one of their competitors.
However, Arm's acquisition of Nvidia may still be blocked by the Johnson government or the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK competition authority.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/cosa-fara-lamericana-nvidia-per-il-supercomputer-leonardo/ on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 05:37:22 +0000.