CINECA climbs the Top 500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world!
Casalecchio di Reno (Bologna, Italy) – 23 Jun 2009: CINECA announces the installation of a new supercomputer facility at its premises in Casalecchio di Reno, near Bologna. The new supercomputing system has a peak processing power of more than 100 trillion operations per second, it is the most powerful supercomputer in Italy, and one of the most powerful and energy-efficient supercomputers in the world: it is ranked 46 on the TOP500 supercomputing list.
CINECA, a private not-for-profit organisation, partially funded by the Ministry of Education University and Research and self funded by mean of R&D fund raising capacity and technology transfer service provision, with this supercomputer will enhance Italy's competitive position in globally important research projects. The supercomputer, an IBM Power 575 supercomputer with 5376 POWER6 cores with a peak performance of more than 100 trillion operations per second, will be used for ground-breaking research in material science, astrophysics, bioinformatics, chemical physics, climate change prediction, medical imaging.
"With the IBM Power 575 now operational, the CINECA facility will deliver high performance computing services fully competitive with those available internationally to the Italian research community" says Sanzio Bassini, Technical Director of CINECA System and Technology Department.
While this platform will be in full open production, a Blue Gene P frame system will be installed in the next few weeks. It will be in controlled production and used to begin the migration of the current application programs toward the new highly massively parallel architecture to address the development of new algorithms and new programming models to exploit the potentiality of the Blue Gene promising architecture. "The CINECA development roadmap foreseen the installation of a Blue Gene Q Petascale System as next milestone in our strategy, as soon as the new technology will be available" comments Marco Lanzarini General Director of CINECA Consortium.
The IBM Power 575 System server is designed for data centres that require high performance, yet within severe constrain in floor space and power and cooling infrastructure. This system has a competitive offerings and a unique water cooled technology. This, combined with additional energy efficiency technologies and the state-of-the-art data centre design at the CINECA premises, which include technology for free cooling at winter time, saves energy significantly, which is one of the sensible objective of CINECA Consortium, that already implanted photovoltaic energy production infrastructure and adopted the most advanced CFD simulation technique to optimize the air flow cooling system inside the computers rooms.
This new IBM Power system extends CINECA's existing supercomputing capability, which includes others more 20.000 cores IBM Linux cluster system.
