What is (and what it will do) davinci-1, the new supercomputer from Leonardo-Finmeccanica
All the details on Leonardo's new supercomputer, davinci-1, 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, equipped with the most recent hardware and software technologies, for a storage capacity of the order of 20Pbytes (20 million Gigabytes), the new supercomputer by Leonardo , davinci-1, installed in the Fiumara Tower in Genoa, although still to be switched on, has already been awarded a mention of honor among the 100 supercomputers on the planet and will be the flagship of that Italy 4.0 which is now more urgent than ever to build to recover from the pandemic. To be precise, davinci-1 was included among the top 100 supercomputers in the world, according to the TOP 500 ranking and on the podium of the A&D (Aerospace & Defense) sector.
WHAT IS DAVINCI-1 FOR?
So much technology and so much power are hard to imagine. Not even around Leonardo seem to have very clear all the possible uses of their new supercomputer. With davinci-1 – let the Group know – Leonardo will be able to accelerate the disruptive technologies that represent the present and the future of innovation: Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Intelligent System, Big Data Analytics, High Performance Computing, Electrification of Aeronautical Platforms, Materials and Structures and Quantum Technologies. "It is – explained Roberto Cingolani , Leonardo Chief Technology & Innovation Officer speaking on the first day of the Genoa Smart Week – of a further step in our digitization process, one of the growth directions of our company, in the long term, contained in the our strategic plan Leonardo Be Tomorrow 2030 ".
THE VERSATILITY OF SUPERCOMPUTERS
"For those in manufacturing, like us – explained Cingolani , one of the leading experts in AI and robotics – the path is complex because it requires important efforts: but to digitize the design of a product and create the digital twin, that is the avatar of a technology, guarantees a series of advantages: raw materials are not used until one is convinced that the prototype is not working, as is already the case today for crash tests ". “Artificial intelligence – continued the professor -, for example, could bring an end to the era of vehicle maintenance coupons, predicting the right moment to warn us that an overhaul is needed. Digitizing today also means having high computing and storage power available. The complex system of an airplane is not very different from that of a city; we need a very high-powered computing system, a place where we can hold all the information to make calculations and statistics, becoming predictive: cloud computing. Here, in summary, why the super computer of Genoa is so important. And the impact on Liguria will concern both job prospects, thanks to the recruitment of resources who will work on the supercomputer in Genoa, and the opening to collaborations with other realities in the area ”.
THE POWER OF DAVINCI-1 EXPLAINED BY TRACKS
Some time ago, Cingolani always said: “The machine must have 10-20 peta bytes to start,” explained Cingolani. We are in the order of magnitude that is billions of bytes. "From the point of view of calculation, flops are normally used", added the head of technological innovation of Leonardo, 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 added – 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 Genoese supercomputer will be a monster with hardware between 10 and 20 betabytes of computing power.
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 a thousand 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 internal to the Divisions of Leonardo ". As at the time 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. As in the days of the discovery of America we know that we are embarking on a revolutionary adventure but we have no idea of the destination.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/davinci-1-il-supercomputer-leonardo-finmeccanica-genova/ on Wed, 02 Dec 2020 15:08:44 +0000.