The World’s Fastest European Technology based Supercomputer for CINECA and Europe

Cineca has selected Atos’ innovative BullSequana XH2000 supercomputing platform, integrated with ParTec’s ParaStation Modulo software for its new supercomputing system, named Leonardo. As part of EuroHPC, Leonardo will fully designed and manufactured in Europe to deliver world-class supercomputing capabilities to support HPC and AI Research in Italy and Europe, while E4 Computer Engineering, Italian SME will provide the services to install, run and maintain the system.

Leonardo Hosting Entity

The Leonardo Hosting Entity consortium, composed by the Italian Research Institutions CINECA, INFN and SISSA, and participated by Austria, Greece, Hungary, Slovenia and Slovakia, is fully co-funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research and the European Commission through the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, a joint collaboration between national governments and the European Union to develop a supercomputing ecosystem with world-class infrastructure in Europe.

Technology and configuration

Featuring Atos’ patented DLC (Direct Liquid Cooling) solution, which minimizes global energy consumption by using warm water up to 40°C, the platform boasts a high energy-efficiency. The new supercomputer will be installed at the end of 2021 in the new data center located at the Bologna Tecnopolo designed to guarantee a PUE lower than 1.1 by combining the DLC solution with high energy efficiency of the electromechanical components of the new site's plants.

Leonardo will be configured with two partitions, the booster equipped with nearly 14,000 NVIDIA Ampere architecture-based GPUs and the general purpose data centric partition with over 3,000 next-generation CPUs from Intel, interconnected with NVIDIA® Mellanox® HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand networking. DDN will provide a highly scalable and performant storage solution with 5PB of flash and 100PB of capacity storage using Exascaler technology.

The modern way of scientific computing that requires the combination of high-performance simulation, data analysis, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and visualization work flows will be supported by ParTec’s ParaStation Modulo Software stack, that will combine computing power, capable of executing around 250 petaflops Linpack (HPL) and 10 exaflops FP16 AI (Artificial Intelligence), to enable advanced AI and HPC converged application use cases and push Italy towards the exascale class of high performance computing.

“Cineca is proud to play a critical part in evolving both the research and industrial community in accelerated HPC application development in Europe,” said Sanzio Bassini, Director of Cineca’s HPC Department, “The Leonardo supercomputer is the result of our long-term commitment and demonstrates the European know how-and capacity to prove what an exascale supercomputer can be.”

Watch the video made to tell what the impact of the supercomputing is in our lives and to anticipate some data on Leonardo.

Leonardo pre-exascale project receives funding from the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking  (JU)