Leonardo, the pre-exascale super brain that will be inaugurated on November 24, 2022 at the Tecnopolo in Bologna, wins 4th place in the Top500 world ranking of the most powerful supercomputers in the world and second place in Europe, behind Lumi, the “brother ”From Finland, again from the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, which co-financed the € 240 million Emilian project together with the Ministry of University and Research.
«It is a milestone that rewards Cineca’s over 50 years of commitment to support research through high-performance computing and confirms Italy’s role as a strategic asset in building the European ecosystem for High Performance Computing. Leonardo will make it possible to support frontier scientific research and technological innovation, thus helping to face the most difficult challenges of our society, including the mitigation and management of risks due to extreme situations, from pandemics to natural events such as earthquakes, tsunamis or sudden floods, many of which are caused by climate change ”, comments Francesco Ubertini, President of Cineca.
The identikit
The Leonardo system officially entered the world ranking today, with the announcement made during SC22, the most important international conference for High Performance Computing, underway in Dallas, Texas. It will have a computational capacity of about 240 petaflops (240 million billion calculations per second, the Finnish Lumi machine – for comparison – has reached 550 PFlops) and over 100 Petabytes (one hundred million Gigabytes) of storage capacity , a power ten times higher than the current Marconi100 system installed at Cineca in Bologna, 24th in the Top500 ranking.
It is a technology of Atos (the French giant number one in Europe in digital and HPC, 11 billion euros in revenues and 112 thousand employees), built on the nodes of the BullSequana XH2000 supercomputer and consisting of two main computing modules: a booster module (174.7 petaflops), which was implemented last October and whose purpose is to maximize computational capacity (via NVIDIA Ampere-based GPUs); and a second Data Centric module, which will be ready in 2023 and will allow to expand the range of applications (via Intel Sapphire Rapids CPU) reaching full power.
To confirm the fourth place that Leonardo won in the Top500 of superPCs is also the record time of its installation: started last July, it continued at a fast pace throughout the summer with the delivery of 155 racks (cabinets) with 5 thousand servers. , hundreds of miles of cables and thousands of components.