MARCONI ranked at number 14 in the new Top500

The Italian supercomputer MARCONI, 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 14 in the Top500 List of the fastest supercomputers in the world.

This latest edition of the TOP500 was announced Monday, November 13, at the SC17 conference in Denver, Colorado. 

The MARCONI computing system installed at Cineca in Autumn 2016 and August 2017 is the largest supercomputer available in Italy today and is the second in Europe.

Marconi system consists at the present of three partitions:

1. Marconi – Broadwell (A1 partition) consists of 21 Lenovo NeXtScale racks with 72 nodes per rack. Each node contains 2 Broadwell processors each with 18 cores and 128 GB of DDR4 RAM
2. Marconi – KNL (A2 partition) consists of 3600 Intel server nodes integrated by Lenovo. Each node contains 1 Intel Knights Landing processor with 68 cores, 16 GB of MCDRAM and 96 GB of DDR4 RAM
3. Marconi – SkyLake (A3 partition) consists of 1512 Intel server nodes. Each node contains 2 SkyLake processors each with 24 cores Intel Xeon 8160 and 196 GB of RAM

Shortly about 800SkyLake nodes will complete the system, taking the total computational power to ~20Pflop/s.

The Marconi - A1 partition is now number 72 in the Top500 list and Marconi - A2/A3 partition is number 14 in the same list, taking to three the number of Cineca systems in the current Top500 list (Galileo #396)

The list reports 6 Italian systems: 3 by Cineca, 2 by ENI (HPC2 and HPC3), but these two systems are managed by Cineca too, under the Eni-Cineca framework contract, and 1 (DAVIDE) by E4 is in Cineca too, under the PRACE Pre Commercial Procurement.

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