The "European supercomputer Leonardo", capable of developing a computing power of up to 250 million billion
operations per second and with a storage capacity of over 100 petabytes (i.e.
over 104 million gigabytes), will be hosted in the premises of the Ex
Manifattura Tabacchi (former Tobacco Factory), near the Bologna exhibition
centre.
In the other room of the
same building there will be another data centre, also of 10MW at the service of
the INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare - National Institute of Nuclear
Physics). Cefla won the tender, worth over 45 million euros, for the design and
construction of the adaptation works of the warehouses, known as “Botti”,
organised by the CINECA Interuniversity Consortium.
The supercomputer, funded by EuroHPC
JU and the Ministry of University and Research, will be available to Italian
and European researchers.
"With the award of the
Cineca Data Centre project", underlines the president of Cefla Gianmaria Balducci, "we confirm that
with our skills we are able to play a major role in a field, such as that of
the qualifying infrastructures, following the acceleration of digital
transformation, which is especially current"
"We are thrilled to
have been chosen to carry out this important project", says Massimo Milani, Managing Director of the BU
Engineering of Cefla. "It represents for us a great confirmation of
the commitment and care that we put every day in performing the works that are
entrusted to us. On this journey, leading partners will collaborate alongside
us and we are sure that this work will further contribute to increasing our
reliability in the field of building highly technological structures, such as
Data Centres."
In this context, Cefla places itself at the head of an ATI (Associazioni
temporanee di imprese - Temporary joint ventures) where the Vicenza building group
ICM Ltd. will take care of the structures and a group of designers, headed by
DBA Pro Ltd., will follow the executive design up to the as build.
The facility requires a TIER 4 Data Centre level, so as to be totally fault tolerant.
This system offers independent and multiple power distribution paths,
thus allowing the maintenance and any further simultaneous failure, without generating
interruptions in the workflow. This guarantees 99.995% uptime, allowing for
planned maintenance and the total protection against physical events.
The Leonardo HPC computer. An HPC (High
Performance Computing) supercomputer, among the most powerful in the world,
will be installed in the area prepared by Cineca, which is partly subject to
artistic constraints since it was built in the 1940s to a design by the
engineer Pier Luigi Nervi.
As a result of the
collaboration between the French Atos and the American Nvidia, the computer,
when fully operational, will be part of the European high-performance EuroHPC
network and will have a computing power 10 times higher than the current
Marconi100 system, also present in Cineca, which it is among the most powerful
computers in the world. The EuroHPC network has the dual objective of
developing a pan-European infrastructure of pre-exascale super computation
(with the exascale computation, 10^18 flops are reached, the unit of
measurement with which the performance of a computer is measured in floating
point calculations; with the EuroHPC system, 250 petaflops can be reached, in
aggregate, ed.), and to support research and innovation activities.
