FERMI reconfirmed among the highest positions in the TOP500

The Italian supercomputer FERMI, IBM Blue Gene/Q, available to the Italian and European scientific community by ISCRA and PRACE, the two inititiatives available to gain access to the system by a peer-review procedure, is now number 15 in the Top500 list. The list was annunced Nov. 18 at SC13 conference in Denver, Colorado.

The FERMI computing system installed at Cineca in June 2012 for the Italian and European research, in production since last summer, remains the larger supercomputer available in Italy today.

FERMI is an IBM Blue Gene/Q configured with 10.240 PowerA2 sockets running at 1.6GHz, with 16 cores each, for a total of 163.840 compute cores and a system peak performance of 2.1 PFlops. Each processor comes with 16Gbyte of RAM (1Gbyte per core). A large I/O storage subsystem with a capacity of about 5 PByte of on-line storage and an equivalent amount of off-line repository.

FERMI is available to researchers via ISCRA the Italian SuperComputing Resource Allocation initiative and via PRACE.

Another system installed at Cineca was ranked in the list, the PLX-GPU supercomputer, the fastest supercomputer available today to Italian industrial and public researchers.