New architectures to reduce processor consumption and simplify their use to open the doors even to non-experts: these are two of the major challenges in the development of supercomputers today and in the future, such as those of Icsc - National Research Center in High Performance Computing, Big Data and Quantum Computing, the large Italian high-performance computing infrastructure available to the world of scientific research and business.
“The development of new applications, for example those of Artificial Intelligence, require large computing capacities which however also require a lot of energy.
A big problem, for which the new supercomputers cannot only be more powerful but must necessarily reduce consumption and be more efficient", said Angelo Garofalo, researcher at the University of Bologna and member of the Spoke 1 Hardware Lab, the ICSC thematic research area dedicated to the Future of High Performance Computing and Big Data.
Born from the meeting of 37 research institutions and 13 companies to make access to the potential of supercomputing easier, Icsc is tackling some of the great challenges of supercomputers: first of all that of energy consumption to which it seeks to provide answers above all by designing new architectures, i.e. the way in which processors can communicate with each other in order to simplify their work, and at the same time simplify their use for the many entities, both industrial and research, that can benefit greatly from them.
It is essential to lower the complexity of access to computer centres, similarly to what happened in the cloud which over time has been able to facilitate usability", said Iacopo Colonnelli, researcher at the University of Turin and member of Software & Integration Living Icsc Lab.
“We must make supercomputing less difficult – added Colonnelli – for people, such as a doctor or an astrophysicist, who want to make use of our potential”.
A difficult process but which is already bringing the first results such as the new methods of analysis and simulation of galaxies developed with researchers from the National Institute of Astrophysics which could soon find application in other projects.
“One of the great challenges of ICSC in general is that it can become sustainable – concluded Colonnelli – in the sense that, as in the case of the work of Inaf researchers, the skills and techniques developed can continue to be exploited in the future for new applications” .
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