To strengthen itself in the global race for supercomputers, Europe chooses Atos, a company from the Old Continent, as supplier of Leonardo, the supercomputing system that will be installed at the Bologna Technopole in 2021 and managed by the Cineca inter-university consortium.
The supercomputer, which aspires to become one of the top five in the world and the most powerful for artificial intelligence, will be able to perform 250 million billion operations per second, making Italy a reference point for the computing needs of research and of the European industry.
Cineca, Ministry of University and Research and EuroHPC European consortium announced it.
Conceived and managed by Cineca in collaboration with the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (Infn) and the International School of Advanced Studies (Sissa), the Leonardo supercomputer will have a storage capacity of over 100 petabytes and thousands of processors that will work in parallel thanks to Nvidia technology.
It will be the first of the European precursors of high-performance computing, along with two other supercomputers that will be installed in Spain and Finland.
With the announcement of Leonardo's suppliers "the first stone was laid for an ambitious building that will enable Italy and Europe to compete with China, the United States and Japan: this is an extraordinary commitment of the European Commission and the 32 participating States ", underlines David Vannozzi, director general of Cineca.
"This day is doubly important, because the European heads of state have decided to allocate 20% of the resources of the Recovery Plan to digital and Italy has also responded enthusiastically: now we have resources to make important arguments for future generations", underlines Roberto Viola, general manager of Dg Connect at the European Commission.
"Italy strongly believes in the European strategy for high performance computing - states the Minister of University and Research, Gaetano Manfredi - and was one of the founding partners of the European initiative" Joint Undertaking EuroHPC, the European Joint Undertaking for high performance computing.
"We are at an important moment in defining the future strategy for Italian research and investment in research infrastructures is a fundamental asset".