It won’t be long now. It’s just a matter of weeks before the supercomputer built by Leonardo—an Italian company active in the defense,aerospace, and security sectors, whose largest shareholder is the Ministry of Economy and Finance, will be ready. By the end of the year, according to the company’s headquarters. This is no small achievement, considering it will offer a processing capacity of 250 petaflops per secondand 100 petabytes of storage capacity, and is expected to rank between third and fifth on the TOP500 list. To date, however, Italy is represented in the TOP500 ranking by Eni’s Italian supercomputer HPC5, which holds the 12th position with an Rm of 35 PFs and an Rp of 51 PFs.

Work has been underway for months at the Bologna technology park: 30 trucks, 157 racks, 4,993 servers—weighing a total of 360,000 kilograms—and hundreds of kilometers of cables. In short,
is an incredible undertaking. Just consider that the supercomputer will be capable of performing a staggering 250 trillion operations per second. The Leonardo system, based on Atos Sequana XH2000 technology—as we’ve already mentioned—will have a computational power of nearly 250 PFlops and will be equipped with over 100 PB of data storage capacity. The system will be interconnected via a 200 Gb/s InfiniBand data network , which will enable the exchange of information between processing units—a critical factor in tackling cutting-edge scientific challenges. In fact, Leonardo will provide 10 times the computing power of the current flagship system Cineca Marconi100.

But what will the supercomputer be capable of? For example, global climate simulations with a resolution of one kilometer, and it will be capable of faster simulation speeds. This feature, in fact, is extremely important in the context of natural disasters, where it is critical to be able to obtain answers in a very short time.
As we mentioned earlier, the supercomputer to be implemented by Leonardo is not the only one in Italy. The supercomputer built by Leonardo at the Bologna Technology Park will be managed by Cineca. That is why, to understand the importance of this project, we need to explain who Cineca is. It is a nonprofit consortium composed of 69 Italian universities, 27 national public research centers, and the Ministry of Universities and Research (MUR), and the Ministry of Education (MIUR), and was founded in 1969 in Casalecchio di Reno, in the province of Bologna.

But CINECA is also the agency designated by the Italian government to serve as the National Center for research in high-performance computing, big data, and quantum computing, coordinated by theNational Institute of Nuclear Physics. In short, it is a project managed by an organization that boasts a wealth of professional expertise and skills. Finally, it is important to specify where this incredible project originated and who is funding it. The Leonardo supercomputer is co-funded with 240 million euros by EuroHPC Joint Undertakingand Ministry of Universities and Research. It will be one of the resources of the National Research Center for High-Performance Computing, Big Data, and Quantum Computing, funded by the PNRR and recently established.