CINECA to Build World’s Fastest AI Supercomputer with NVIDIA and Atos

New “Leonardo” System to Deliver 10 Exaflops of AI Performance to Power Italy’s HPC and AI Research

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Oct. 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NVIDIA today announced that the Italian inter-university consortium CINECA — one of the world’s most important supercomputing centers — will use the company’s accelerated computing platform to build the world’s fastest AI supercomputer.

The new “Leonardo” system, built with Atos, is expected to deliver 10 exaflops of FP16 AI performance to enable advanced AI and HPC converged application use cases. Featuring nearly 14,000 NVIDIA Ampere architecture-based GPUs and NVIDIA Mellanox HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand networking, Leonardo will propel Italy as the global leader in AI and high performance computing research and innovation.

Leonardo is procured by EuroHPC, a collaboration between national governments and the European Union to develop a world-class supercomputing ecosystem and exascale supercomputing in Europe, and funded by the European Commission through the Italian Ministry of University and Research.

“The EuroHPC technology roadmap for exascale in Europe is opening doors for rapid growth and innovation in HPC and AI,” said Marc Hamilton, vice president of solutions architecture and engineering at NVIDIA. “We’re working with CINECA and Atos to accelerate scientific discovery across a broad range of application domains, providing a platform to usher in the era of exascale computing.”

Modern scientific computing requires high-performance simulation, data analytics, AI and machine learning, and visualization. NVIDIA’s computing platform accelerates all of these workloads while providing extremely high throughput and low power consumption, making it ideal for scientific computing. Examples of research using this approach include work in such areas as:

• Drug discovery: Using genomic analysis to identify promising proteins that can be targeted with a specific drug to fight COVID-19 and other diseases.
• Space exploration and research: Harnessing the tools of multi-messenger astrophysics — which incorporates data from wide-ranging sources, such as electromagnetic waves, gravitational waves and neutrinos — to better understand the universe.
• Weather modeling: Predicting extreme weather conditions with greater accuracy and speed.