This text is part of the Italian Tech album “In search of a better future”, on newsstands with Repubblica on May 4th.
Every day the “time factory”, as they call it in these parts, digests 800 million observations arriving from satellites, sea buoys, planes, ships, balloons and various sensors to take the most precise picture possible of the weather conditions on the planet. He discards 90% of them and, thanks to a mathematical model made up of millions of lines of code, comes to compose up to 3 thousand different cards with short, medium and long term forecasts on the temperature trend, the probability of fires, the possibility of precipitation or the ozone trend. Data that then end up, among other things, in the weather apps on all our smartphones. Because since last October, under the vaults of the former tobacco factory in Bologna, designed by Pier Luigi Nervi, the Weather Center has found a home and is fully operational, more precisely “European center for medium-range weather forecasts – Ecmwf”, the European center for medium-range weather forecastswhich for its productive part has definitively left the English headquarters in Reading, which has become too small for the growing needs of the institution.
His Atos Sequana, a supercomputer with over 8,000 computing nodes cost 80 million euros and made to measure, is the neighbor of Leonardo, the other supercomputer managed by the Cineca inter-university consortium and hosted under the same vaults, inaugurated in November by the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella. Leonardo is in fourth place among the most powerful computers in the world and together with that of the Meteorological Centre, it actually constitutes the new heart (indeed, the brain) of the Emilian “Data Valley”, a study and processing district on big data which according to local institutions is concentrated here, between the Tecnopolo on the outskirts of the capital and the Cineca headquarters in Casalecchio, 80% of the Italian computing capacity and 20% of the European one.
The processing of this enormous mass of data currently corresponds to two precise noises: that of the bulldozers, because part of the Technopole area remains an ongoing construction site for the future arrival of other research centers and new supercomputers, and a continuous buzz that increases in volume as you get closer to the cabinets that make up the computers. It is produced by the powerful liquid cooling systems necessary to keep the two brains from going haywire at work.
Bologna has become the seat of the “time factory”, as he calls it Matthew Dell’Acqua, director of the local data centre, after the Reading headquarters in May 2015 asked the 23 member countries of the ECMWF who would be willing to host the body’s data centre, which needed more space, for the next thirty years . Candidates were Exeter and Slough, in England, plus Bologna, Luxembourg, Espoo in Finland and Akureyri in Iceland, but it was the Italian project presented by the government and the Emilia-Romagna Region that convinced the council called to evaluate the proposals, for a series of points in favor: the logistical position of Bologna, easily accessible, the availability of suitable electricity connections and the presence of the optical fiber network of the regional company Lepida, with a capacity of over 60 Gbps and constantly increasing. The proximity of Cineca, the national institution of High Performance Computing (Hpc) and one of the great European computing centres, and other research institutes such as Infn, the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, also play in Bologna’s favor.
And now the Ecmwf data center is here, with 38 people who will soon become 50out of a total of 300 of the institution (in addition to Reading and Bologna there is an office in Bonn).
“It is a truly international office, with people arriving from various European countries – says Dell’Acqua -. We started a little late due to Covid, but now it is going very well. Having Cineca as a neighbor is very important , also because we will use Leonardo for some of the projects we are working on”.
The weather forecasts that come out of these computers are essential for many activities, ranging from agriculture to transport, from construction to civil protection. The Ecmwf model divides the surface of the world into 6.5 million boxes with six variables fundamentals: temperature, humidity, precipitation, pressure, wind intensity and wind direction. This means that for each forecast instant, the system forecasts the status of 39 million variables in total. It goes without saying that to do this you need a damn powerful and fast computer.
“Scientists soon realized that computer science would hold the key to weather forecasting. With the first computer, we had the first numerical model. Since then, computing capabilities have continued to increase, and this is one of the main reasons progress in forecasts – continues Dell’Acqua – . At first it took 24 hours to make a forecast, today the same operation is done in minutes. And to maintain this computing power every 4-5 years we have to totally change our computers“.
In fact it is a process that never stops: while the computer works its successor is being studied and for this very reason, under the vault that houses the Atos Sequana cabinets there is plenty of empty space to assemble the next one. In fact, activity can never stop and while the largest IT companies study, assemble and test the next model, the old one continues to calculate until the last moment. Over the years among the suppliers there have been many companies such as Cray, Fujitsu, Ibm or Atos. Next to the vaults that host the computers there is then the archive, which today exceeds 700 Petabytes of data.
“It is the “memory of time” – , underlines the director – With the increase in computing capacity, the data to be kept also increase accordingly. It is a very important archive, open to the whole world, for studying climate trends “.
When someone in the world does a search, many automated arms pick the specific card from the correct cabinet and start sharing the requested data. The Meteorological Center has also been working for seven years on the EU’s Copernicus project and Destination Earth, which aims to create a digital Earth model, started a year ago and also involves the European Space Agency (ESA) and Eumetsat, the organization European Union for the operation of meteorological satellites. It is inevitable to ask the director Dell’Acqua how he sees climate change from his particular point of view.
“The impression is that there is always a lot of skepticism, despite the many studies demonstrating the influence of human activities on the climate. So much so that we too are starting to take the impact of human action into account in our forecasting model on the environment. Perhaps, however – he admits – we need to make our science more accessible and we should all be better at communicating, at explaining to people what we see with our studies. We need young people to understand the importance of all this, and we need that adults accept the discoveries and data that scientists around the world produce”.
Not far away Leonardo is also in business, even if it remains in the pre-production phase. After all, all around there are still many works in progress to adapt the structure, while its enormous computing capacity is clear. For technicians: Leonardo has a computational power of almost 250 PetaFlops and has over 100 PB of archive capacity. It can perform 250 trillion operations per second, it cost 240 million euros (including date and operating costs) and provides computing capacity ten times greater than Cineca’s previous supercomputer, the Marconi 100, housed not far away in the Casalecchio di Reno headquarters.
“Cineca has a long history in the field of high performance computers – he explains Sanzio Bassini, supercomputing director of Cineca – . The growth of the Emilian Data Valley, with the arrival of the Meteorological Center Data and now with Leonardo, has been made possible by a strategic vision that over the years has seen the convergence of the various levels of government, even overcoming the various political alignments. A sign of how strategic this issue is considered”.
The new supercomputer will be available for scientific research, with periodic calls to identify the most valuable projects that will have access to supercomputing. But also some companies, which will be able to “rent” the supercomputer, as evidenced by the agreement already reached with Dompè, which will be able to exploit Leonardo to develop new drugs.
The applications after all, they are infinite. From the simulation necessary for the development of nuclear fusion reactors to precision medicine, from the circular economy to advanced mobility that will be able to count on the billions of data produced by intelligent and interconnected vehicles. In addition of course to the study of climate change, weather forecasts and the creation of digital twins for cities or even for the entire planet, as envisaged by the Destination Earth project in which the Weather Center also works. Even Leonardo, however, is in a certain sense already old. In fact, between the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024, one of the six quantum computers will be added to it, which will finance EuroHpc on the continent, a joint EU undertaking that aims to create the European high-performance computing ecosystem, with a new investment of 25 million.
“In perspective, after Leonardo there will be post-exascale machines, on which we are already working – continues Bassini -. The scientific community has not yet decided what the prevailing model of technology for computers of the future will be. We are managing several, from quantum computers to neomorphic architectures, from specialized accelerators to modular architectures”.