Inaugurated Leonardo
Leonardo, the supercomputer created and managed by CINECA, is finally online. The inauguration took place on 24 November at the Tecnopolo in Bologna: it is the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world. Together with LUMI, located in Finland, Europe now has two of the most powerful supercomputers.
Leonardo consists of 3 modules and 5000 computational nodes, has 3+ PB RAM, 150PB storage and the performance peak reaches 200+ PFlops . 240 million euros were invested in the project, officially announced in 2019 during the Researchers' Night.
Leonardo Supercomputer The system has 3500 Intel Xeon processors and 14000 Nvidia A100 GPUs. Leonardo will also integrate quantum processors in the future to improve performance and support more and more calculations. There is currently talk of 150 million billion calculations per second.
“In my role as President of Cineca, I am pleased to represent the team that has achieved this result” said Prof. Eng. Eugenio di Sciascio. “With the support of the Ministry of University and Research, it was possible to fulfill the objective of bringing the world of Italian research into Europe as a protagonist, and to help lay the foundations for concretely realizing the European Research System. The goal is to allow European research, public and private, to compete globally on the issues that will characterize the future of our society. Europe has asked us to support this unified vision, which is projected into the future, our commitment will be strong and concrete”.
In addition to Leonardo and LUMI, the commissioning of a third supercomputer is expected: the Marenostrum 5BSC in Spain. The three will collaborate to develop new applications in areas such as artificial intelligence, biomedicine, astrophysics, drug, treatment and vaccine design, bioengineering, weather forecasting and the fight against climate change.
Leonardo Supercomputer Leonardo is part of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking project of the European Union and some private partners which aims to pave the way for supercomputing in Europe. The goal is to develop an ecosystem of supercomputers that then becomes a real supply chain for the applications to run on them.