Time.news – The appointment is for November 24th. The head of state, Sergio Mattarella, in Bologna with the highest institutional offices, will christen Leonardo, the Italian pre-exascale EuroHPC supercomputer, based on Atos’ BullSequana XH2000 technologyrecognized as the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world and the second in Europe in the international Top500 ranking.
A futuristic infrastructure in which there have been investments of 240 million euros, co-financed by euroHPC and the Ministry of University and Research. Dozens of people have worked on the Atos project with Cineca and EuroHPC, which started a couple of years ago.
And 30 trucks have crossed the peninsula to bring every single component of Leonardo to the industrial warehouse that houses it, which will complement the supercomputer already in use at Cineca, a bit ‘old-fashioned’, which will be dedicated to a specific function.
© Eric PIERMONT / AFP
But why is Leonardo so important also in the daily life of individuals? The Time.news addressed this question to Giuseppe Di Franco, CEO of Atos. “Leonardo is not a computer like the ones we use every day, only more powerful – explains Di Franco – the example we can give to make people understand what an infrastructure of this type is is that of two people called to think a part of the same reasoning in parallel. The solution to that reasoning will come more quickly. If we put a very large number of people to think a piece of reasoning in parallel, this generates the ability to arrive at the solution of complex operations quickly. This is Leonard.”
In other words, understanding scientific phenomena or studying new industrial projects today requires high-performance simulations, data analysis, artificial intelligence and data visualization that Leonardo will allow with extremely high performance and in an optimized way.
And technically speaking, the supercomputer will have a computing power of 250 petaFlopsfor a total of 250 trillion floating point operations per second, 10 times more than the previous system, with a storage capacity of over 100 petabytes; it is equipped with approximately 3,500 Intel Xeon processors and 14,000 GPUs of Nvidia’s Ampere architecture, with performance of 10 ExaFlops in reduced precision, typical of Artificial Intelligence applications; the data-centric partition is based on BullSequana X2140 three-node CPU Blade and is equipped with two 4th generation Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs (formerly codenamed Sapphire Rapids), each with 56 cores, to be installed in early 2023.
With the new supercomputer, Atos and Cineca will assist the European Union in various research fields, including in defense against environmental and health emergencies. “Supercomputers are the basis of complex studies such as those of meteorology – underlines Di Franco, quoting the iconic phrase of the 2004 film ‘The butterflay effect’, ‘the beating of a butterfly’s wings in Bangkok is capable of causing a hurricane in New York’ – the weather is a very complex system. An accurate forecast prevents adverse phenomena and also allows the best use of renewable sources, from hydroelectric to solar to wind power. But they also serve to estimate impacts on the human body for different types of action, from the vaccine, to surgery to the ability to use artificial limbs. What needs to be tested in a physical environment is transported in a digital or virtual environment and millions of tests can be done”.
The margin of error of this type of analysis “depends on the accuracy of the digital model, but, as happened with pixel photography, the finer the simulation model, the more effective the result. The more I have calculation capacity, the more precise the simulation is and this has very positive repercussions on research and industry”, remarked the top manager.
“New technologies can replace, for example, wind tunnels for testing cars, planes and space vehicles – he continues – and the level and quality of design rises a lot”. The accuracy of the research has, on the other side of the coin, greater economic competitiveness. “The quality of planning is the future of the economy”, according to Di Franco, and for bridges, roads and smart cities themselves, the design of which involves the systemisation of an enormous amount of variables, supercomputers will provide quick and effective solutions.
“The challenge is also in human capital – warns the CEO of Atos – the supercomputer is a technological infrastructure but people capable of making models are neededto ask questions, to review business processes in a digital key”.
E in Italy there is a digital gap, “not significant at an individual level, but significant in public institutions and in medium and small businesses. Making the work of these people more productive requires digitizing it”. Leonardo “is a turning point for the country, it will be available to the university world and a driving force for the development of all research areas and the business world”, both those that already have the skills to use this technology, but also for the others, because “there is an interface group also made up of our people from Atos. And Atos is also developing an extensive training program by creating alliances with universities such as Bologna, Milan, Bari, Federico II in Naples and Calabria to train new graduates and convert resources from the working world”.