With PITAGORA Italy Strengthens European Leadership in Fusion Energy Research
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PITAGORA, the new high-performance supercomputer entirely dedicated to nuclear fusion research, was inaugurated on Monday 3/10/2025 at CINECA’s Data Center in Casalecchio di Reno (Bologna). Funded by the European consortium EUROfusion and operated in collaboration with ENEA, the system marks a new milestone in Europe’s scientific and technological capacity for fusion energy research.
The inauguration ceremony was attended by Anna Maria Bernini, Minister of Universities and Research, and Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, Minister of the Environment and Energy Security, hosted by Francesco Ubertini, President of CINECA. They were joined by Gianfranco Federici, Programme Manager at EUROfusion, Francesca Mariotti, President of ENEA, and Francesca Ferrazza, Head of Magnetic Fusion Initiatives at Eni.
With a performance of 27.9 petaflops for the GPU partition and 15.2 petaflops for the CPU partition, PITAGORA enables advanced simulations of plasma physics and the structural analysis of fusion materials — both essential for validating results from ITER and supporting the design of the future DEMO fusion power plant.
The system is based on Lenovo ThinkSystem servers with AMD Turin processors and NVIDIA H100 GPUs, combining more than 260,000 cores and 20 petabytes of hybrid storage. Thanks to Lenovo Neptune™ Direct Water-Cooling technology, PITAGORA achieves a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of about 1.1, ranking among the Top 50 most powerful and energy-efficient supercomputers worldwide at its debut in November 2024.
“With PITAGORA, CINECA continues to support European fusion research — a journey that began in 2016 with MARCONI-FUSION,” said Francesco Ubertini, President of CINECA. “It reflects the close collaboration between institutions and the research community, confirming Italy’s central role in Europe’s strategy for supercomputing and artificial intelligence.”
PITAGORA further strengthens Bologna’s position as a European hub for high-performance computing, fusion science, and technological innovation.