Leonardo is Italy’s supercomputer powerhouse. Located in a specially built data centre ran by the Interuniversity Consortium for Automatic Computing (CINECA).
Leonardo can process vast datasets and can be used to simulate the weather, climate models, or molecular structures.
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To put its performance into perspective, it would be like solving 250 quadrillion mathematical problems in the time it takes to blink.
Capacity was granted a rare look at the supercomputer as part of a press tour with Vertiv.
The supercomputer itself is located in what is quickly becoming ‘Italy's data valley’ inside a vast complex that was previously the home to Manifattura Tabacchi, a tobacco manufacturing facility built in the 1950s.
The site is being redeveloped and transformed into ‘Bologna Technopole’ to act as a key European hub for computing and data processing.
At the heart of it, sits Leonardo in a 32x32 rectangle room made of reinforced concrete. It’s built to last and can even withstand certain seismic events.
C2, the unit that houses Leonardo, is made up of three floors, with Leonardo in the middle, with four power stations above and four funnels for cooling below.
“[Leonardo] is like a sandwich, the good part of the sandwich,” joked Massimo Alessio Mauri. facility manager at Cineca.
It’s one of the most powerful supercomputing systems in the world. In its first appearance on the biannual Top500 list in 2022, Leonardo came fourth and was the second highest-ranking European unit. It has since dropped down to ninth in the latest list, but it's still firmly in the world’s top ten supercomputers.
Behind it is some impressive hardware: It’s an Atos BullSequana XH2000-based system, housing well over 13,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs, which are grouped four per node, for a total of 3,456 nodes.
Capacity got a first-hand look inside one of the many hardware trays powering the supercomputer, which was being repaired following water block damage.
The supercomputer is split across two module types: Booster Modules, which are designed to support computationally demanding applications, and a Data Centre Module, suitable for more broad use cases.
In total, Leonardo is capable of around 250plfops and is equipped with over 100 petabytes of storage capacity.
It also boasts an advanced cooling system, utilising both warm water for cooling as well as a closed-circuit piping system that pumps in cool air to keep optimal temperature control.
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