Cineca Consorzio Interuniversitario (CINECA) is a non-profit consortium of 70 Italian Universities, the National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics (OGS), the National Research Council (CNR), and the Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR). It is the national supercomputing facility, one of the largest in Europe; its HPC infrastructure is equipped with cutting-edge technology and it offers highly qualified personnel that cooperate with researchers and customers for the most effective exploitation of the HPC systems, in both the academic and industrial fields.

Role in TREX

The mission of the CINECA HPC department is to accelerate scientific discovery by providing high performance computing resources, data management and storage systems and tools and HPC services and expertise at large, aiming to develop and promote technical and scientific services related to high-performance computing for the Italian and European research community. CINECA is one the PRACE Tier-0 hosting members and it has been selected as one of the EuroHPC JU hosting sites for one of the new pre-exascale systems.

The HPC Department in CINECA has a long experience in cooperating with the researchers in parallelising, enabling and scaling up their applications in different computational disciplines, covering condensed matter physics, astrophysics, geophysics, chemistry, earth sciences, engineering, CFD, mathematics and bioinformatics, but also “non-traditional” ones, such as biomedicine, archaeology and data-analytics. CINECA has a wide experience in providing education and training in the different fields of parallel computing and computational sciences.

Relevant infrastructures and facilities

The current HPC infrastructure offers:

• Tier-0 MARCONI Lenovo NeXtScale consisting of three partitions: A1, equipped with Intel Xeon Broadwell E5-2697v4 (54432 cores); A2, based on Intel Knights Landing E7250 (244800 cores); A3, with Intel SkyLake E8160 (72576 cores). CINECA hosts the Marconi100 supercomputer, which is actually ranked as the 11th in the Top500 list, and it will be the hosting site of the new EuroHPC pre-exascale machine, Leonardo. 
• D.A.V.I.D.E. the PRACE 3IP PCP prototype. It is the energy-aware, High Performance Cluster based on OpenPOWER servers and featuring liquid cooling and an innovative technology for monitoring and capping the power consumption, developed by E4 Computer Engineering.