Page 47 - EE Times Europe Magazine – June 2024

EE|Times EUROPE 47

SUPERCOMPUTERS
Cineca’s Bassini on the Secrets of Leonardo’s

Supercomputing Power

By Pat Brans

isted as sixth in the world and second supercomputer in Europe on the by EuroHPC and by the Italian Ministry of
most recent TOP500 list, Leonardo is managed by Cineca, a consortium Universities and Research.
The site is now one of the largest concen-
of universities, national research agencies, research hospitals and trations of high-performance computing
L ministries in Italy. To get the inside story about Leonardo, we sat systems in the world. Two large HPC systems
down with Sanzio Bassini, director of the high-performance computing (HPC) are managed by ECMWF, Leonardo is man-
aged by Cineca and another large hyperscale
division at Cineca. HPC system is housed in another barrel and
is managed by INFN [the National Institute of
EE TIMES EUROPE: Could In 2006, the British Ameri- Nuclear Physics].
you explain how Leonardo can Tobacco Company, which
started? owned the factory at the EE TIMES EUROPE: How big is Leonardo?
Sanzio Bassini: Leonardo is time, decided to move all pro- Bassini: The current configuration of
housed in what used to be a duction to Naples. Ownership Leonardo consists of two partitions. One is
large tobacco factory in Bolo- was then handed off to the for general purposes, and we call it the Data
gna that was constructed in regional government, which Centric module. It consists of 1,536 compute
1952. The factory was designed in 2019 turned the building nodes based on Intel Sapphire Rapids CPUs.
by Pier Luigi Nervi, who was over to ECMWF [European The other partition is for heavier tasks and is
a star architect at that time— Centre for Medium-Range called the Booster module. It consists of
like Gaudi was a star in Spain. Weather Forecasts], which 3,456 compute nodes, which are based on
In fact, because it had been built a data center with two Nvidia A100 GPUs.
designed by Pier Luigi Nervi, Sanzio Bassini large HPC systems in three We are in the process of adding a third
it’s considered an industrial of the large barrels. During partition, specifically for AI. This is part of a
archaeological site, under the surveillance of the same year, a pre-exascale computer that major upgrade that we expect to be open for
the Ministry of Cultural Heritage in Italy. The was partially funded by EuroHPC was built production at the beginning of 2025. The new
design was such that the production part of in another barrel. The year 2019 was the partition will be called LISA, an abbreviation
the factory consisted of a very large collection 500th anniversary of the birth of Leonardo for Mona Lisa. We’ve retrofitted a name to fit
of barrels, each 30 meters in diameter and da Vinci, so we called that new supercom- the acronym: Leonardo Improved Supercom-
100 meters long. puter Leonardo. Leonardo is co-funded puter Architecture.

Leonardo supercomputer (Source: Leonardo Cineca)

www.eetimes.eu | JUNE 2024