The supercomputer Leonardo of the Cineca consortium wins the fourth place of the Top500the list of most powerful supercomputers in the world, and the second in Europewith a measured performance of High-Performance Linpack (Hpl) of 174.7 petaflops. They announced it during the sc22the most important international conference for thehigh performance computing underway in Dallas, Texas. The supercomputer was co-funded by the EuroHpc Joint Undertaking (Eurohpc Ju) and the Ministry of University and Research.
“Cineca is very proud of the result achieved by Leonardo in the Top500 list. This
milestone rewards the commitment of the consortium, which for over fifty years supports the research
through high-performance computing and confirms Italy’s role as a strategic asset in the
building the european hpc ecosystem – declared Francesco Ubertini, president of Cineca -. Supercomputers like Leonardo are able to provide the computational power needed to model, simulate and thus help understand complex phenomena. Leonardo will make it possible to support frontier scientific research and technological innovation, thus helping to face the most difficult challenges of our societyincluding mitigating and managing risks from extreme situations, from pandemics to natural events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic events or flash floods – many of which may be caused by climate change”.
The other goals
In this edition of the Top500, in addition to Leonardo, cineca is also present with Marconi100,
who won the twenty-fourth place of the ranking. Furthermore, the consortium manages the supercomputer of Eni Hpc5in thirteenth place, the most powerful among the systems dedicated to industrial applications.
The Leonardo system is provided by Athosbased on the Bull Sequana XH2000. The supercomputer is made up of two main calculation modules: a booster module, which was implemented in October 2022, whose purpose is to maximize the computational capacity through gpu based on Nvidia Ampere and a Data Centric module, which will be ready in 2023, with the aim of satisfying a wider range of applications through Intel Sapphire Rapids CPUs. The newly released booster module achieved a HPL of 174.7 petaflops, taking fourth place in the Top500.
“Leonardo will be a central enabler in the Italian and European technological futurea strategic infrastructure that will allow research, innovation and key sectors of our economy to generate new value and long-term opportunities”, says Giuseppe Di Franco, managing director and executive vice president of Atos Group.
Works in progress
Despite the excellent result, the system it’s not complete yet: Leonardo’s installation is not finished yet. For this reason Cineca and Atos expect to improve Leonardo’s performance up to reach between 240 and 250 petaflops Hpl in the coming weeks, for a total of 250 million billion floating point operations per second – 10 times more than the previous Cineca system – with a storage capacity of over 100 petabytes. In the co-planning the issue of the sustainability. All the technological solutions used were also evaluated from the point of view of their environmental impact, in particular those used for the cooling down of the supercomputer rooms and data center.
In Italy there is the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world