Cineca, established in 1969, is a non-profit consortium of 70 Italian Universities, 9 national research institution, and the Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR). Cineca is the largest Italian supercomputing centre with an HPC environment equipped with cutting-edge technology and highly-qualified personnel which cooperates with researchers in the use of the HPC infrastructure, in both the academic and industrial fields. Cineca’s mission is to enable the Italian and European research community to accelerate the scientific discovery using HPC resources in a profitable way, exploiting the newest technological advances in HPC, data management, storage systems, tools, services and expertise at large.
On mandate of the Ministry of University and Research, Cineca represents Italy in PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (www.prace-ri.eu), a persistent pan-European Research Infrastructure (RI) providing leading HPC resources to enable world-class science and engineering for academia and industry in Europe. Cineca is one of the four PRACE Tier-0 Hosting Centres since June 2014.
Cineca is one of the founding members of the European Technology Platform for HPC (ETP4HPC), an industry led forum providing a framework for stakeholders, to define research priorities and action plans on a number of technological areas where achieving EU growth, competitiveness and sustainability requires major research and technological advances in the medium to long term period. Moreover, Cineca HPC Department is the Italian representative in the pan-European EUDAT Collaborative Data e-Infrastructure and core partner in Human Brain Project, the EU flagship project facing the big challenge of understanding the human brain.
More recently, Cineca has been selected as a hosting entity of one of the future EuroHPC precursor to exascale European supercomputers, Leonardo. Leonardo is a step forward towards providing exascale computing capabilities to researchers across Italy and Europe. Leonardo aims at maximum performance and can be classified as a top tier supercomputing system in Europe. Leonardo system is capable of nearly 250 PFlops and equipped with over 100 PB of storage capacity. The system will provide 10 times the computational power of the current Cineca flagship system Marconi100.
Besides the national scientific HPC facility Cineca manages and exploits the supercomputing facility of the Italian energy company (ENI).
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, life sciences and bioinformatics, but also “non-traditional” ones, such as biomedicine, archaeology and data-analytics. Cineca has strong relationship with its own stakeholders and collaborates with the scientific communities to enable and develop new applications and tools to better address the challenges of the High-end HPC systems. Cineca has a wide experience in providing education and training in the different fields of parallel computing and computational sciences and is one of the six PRACE Advanced Training Centres (PATCs).
Finally, Cineca has a long history in co-design, deploy and manage, high TRL (6 to 8) HPC prototypes, like the hot water cooled heterogeneous Eurora system that was ranked in the 1st place of the green 500 in June 2013, and the most recent DAVIDE OpenPower system.
