Since its origins in 1969, Cineca offers support to scientific research, public and industrial, through supercomputing and the use of the most innovative computing systems based on state-of-the-art architectures and technologies.
Since the late 1960s, the Italian Ministry of Education together with four Italian universities founded consortium to manage a supercomputing center, which hosted the first Italian supercomputer, a CDC 6600, designed by the father of the supercomputing Seymour Cray.
Since then, Cineca's supercomputers are among the most important in Europe and worldwide, always present in the Top 500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
Cineca's aim is to accelerate the scientific discovery by providing high performance computing resources, data management, as well as HPC services and expertise. Moreover, Cineca provides technical and scientific services related to high-performance computing to the Italian and European research community.
The staff dedicated to HPC supports the users, and offers consultancy in tools and techniques in several disciplinary fields ranging from medicine to meteorology, from seismology to fluid dynamics, to bioinformatics and chemistry, to provide a solid and reliable computing environment for the scientific community.
Today Cineca's flagship supercomputer is MARCONI, a highly parallel system that in November 2019 was ranked 19th in the Top500. One of its partitions, thanks to the collaboration between Cineca and ENEA, is reserved for the European consortium EUROfusion, born to study how to produce electricity starting from nuclear fusion by the middle of the century.