CINECA – Consorzio Interuniversitario

Country

Italy

Main Contact

Claudio Arlandini
c.arlandini@cineca.it

CINECA – Consorzio Interuniversitario

Country

Italy

Main Contact

Claudio Arlandini
c.arlandini@cineca.it

Description

CINECA – Consorzio Interuniversitario established in 1969 (www.hpc.CINECA.it), is a non-profit Consortium composed by 93 universities and public institutions, is led by a Board of Directors composed of the rectors/delegates of the universities and public bodies members of the Consortium, and one delegate of the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of University and Research. CINECA is the largest Italian supercomputing centre with an HPC/HPDA environment equipped with cutting-edge technology and highly-qualified personnel which cooperates with researchers in the use of the infrastructure, in both the academic and industrial fields. CINECA’s mission is to enable the Italian and European research community to accelerate the scientific discovery using HPC/HPDA resources in a profitable way, exploiting the newest technological advances in computing, data management, storage systems, tools, services and expertise at large.

On mandate of the MIUR Ministry, CINECA represents Italy in PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (www.prace-ri.eu), a persistent pan-European Research Infrastructure (RI) providing leading HPC resources to enable world-class science and engineering for academia and industry in Europe. CINECA is one of the PRACE Tier-0 Hosting Centres and is hosting LEONARDO, a pre-exascale EU systems on behalf of the EuroHPC JU initiative. CINECA is one of the founding members of the European Technology Platform for HPC (ETP4HPC), an industry led forum providing a framework for stakeholders, to define research priorities and action plans on a number of technological areas where achieving EU growth, competitiveness and sustainability requires major research and technological advances in the medium to long term period. Moreover, CINECA SCAI is the Italian representative in the pan-European EUDAT Collaborative Data e-Infrastructure and core partner in Human Brain Project, the EU flagship project facing the big challenge of understanding the human brain.

The SCAI Department in CINECA has a long experience in cooperating with the researchers in parallelising, enabling and scaling-up their applications in different computational disciplines, covering condensed matter physics, astrophysics, geophysics, chemistry, earth sciences, engineering, CFD, mathematics, life sciences and bioinformatics, but also “non-traditional” ones, such as biomedicine, archaeology and data-analytics.

CINECA has strong relationship with its own stakeholders and collaborates with the scientific communities to enable and develop new applications and tools to better address the challenges of the High-end HPC/HPDA systems. CINECA has a wide experience in providing education and training in the different fields of parallel computing and computational sciences and is one of the six PRACE Advanced Training Centres (PATCs). CINECA is also founding member of the local BigData Association that aims to provide the National Big Data infrastructure that will be based at the Bologna Technopole together with ECMWF; founding member of the Italian Competence Center BI-REX (part of the National Plan for IND4.0); mapped as a Digital Innovation Hub in EU and Gold label BDVA Innovation Space (i-Space).

Main infrastructure

Marconi 100

MARCONI 100 is an accelerated cluster based on IBM Power9 architecture and Volta NVIDIA GPUs, acquired by Cineca within PPI4HPC European initiative. This system opens the way to the pre-exascale Leonardo Supercomputer expected to be installed in 2021.
It is available from April 2020 to the Italian public and industrial researchers. Its computing capacity is about 32 PFlops.

  • Nodes: 980
  • Processors: 2×16 cores IBM POWER9 AC922 at 3.1 GHz
  • Accelerators: 4 x NVIDIA Volta V100 GPUs, Nvlink 2.0, 16GB
  • Cores: 32 cores/node
  • RAM: 256 GB/node
  • Peak Performance: ~32 PFlop/s

Related project

Lincoln

(LEAN INNOVATIVE CONNECTED VESSELS)

Added-value specialized vessels able to run requested services for Marine Aquaculture, Ocean Energy, Coastal Monitoring, Control and Surveillance, and Rescue sectors in the most effective, efficient, economic valuable and eco-friendly way.

Website