The CINECA supercomputing center in Bologna, Italy, has selected Atos’ BullSequana XH2000 supercomputing platform integrated with ParTec’s ParaStation Modulo software for its new 240 petaFLOPS HPC system, “Leonardo.”
Featuring Atos’ DLC (Direct Liquid Cooling) technology using warm water up to 40°C, the platform is designed for energy efficiency. Scheduled for installation at the end of 2021 in the new data center at the Bologna Tecnopolo, the system is expected to have a PUE lower than 1.1 by combining DLC with high energy efficiency of the electromechanical components of the new site’s plants, CINECA said.
Leonardo will have more than 120 BullSequana XH2000 Direct Liquid cooling racks. It 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 scalable 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 HPC 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 240 petaflops Linpack (HPL) and 10 exaflops FP16 AI,” CINECA said in its announcement, “to enable advanced AI and HPC converged application use cases and push Italy towards the exascale class of high performance computing.”
The Leonardo Hosting Entity consortium, composed of the Italian Research Institutions CINECA, INFN and SISSA, and supported by the participation of 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.
“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.”
