GAIA Cloud
GAIA CLOUD
GAIA HPC Cloud is an infrastructure combining cloud flexibility with High Performance Computing power.
Hosted at CINECA Dama Technopole in Bologna, it is the largest HPC cloud for research in Italy. It supports data processing, analysis and data management services, sensitive workloads, and Kubernetes-based automation. GAIA proves particularly suitable for handling AI workloads, such as fine-tuning and inference, applicable across multiple scientific domains.
Based on OpenStack virtualization tool, it includes 500 Dell servers with over 130,000 physical cores and 256 NVIDIA GPUs. The storage includes 10 PB raw Ceph and 50 PB full-flash VAST system, suitable for HPC-and-cloud synergy.
GAIA operates under an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model. CINECA manages hardware and virtualization, while users control their environments. The system empowers researchers with scalable, customizable, and high-performance resources.
System architecture
CPU nodes
- 420 Interactive OpenStack Nodes
- Each node consist of:
- 2x CPU Intel Xeon Sierra Forrest 144 cores 2.2GHz
- 1 TiB of DDR5 6400 MT/s
GPU nodes
- 80 Interactive OpenStack Nodes
- Each node consist of:
- 2x CPU Intel Xeon Emerald Rapids Platinum 8592+ 64 cores 1.9GHz
- 1 TiB of DDR5 4800 MT/s
- some equipped with 256 GPUs:
- 80 GPUs Nvidia A30 (HPC)
- 112 GPUs Nvidia L40s (AI/Graph 3D)
- 64 GPUs Nvidia H100 NVL (AI+HPC)
- Storage
-
- 2 PB IOPS-optimized/SSD Ceph Storage
- 8 PB Capacity-optimized/HDD Ceph Storage
