Leonardo is a
petascale
Petascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least 1015 floating point operations per second (1 petaFLOPS). Petascale computing allowed faster processing of traditional supercomputer applications. The first system ...
supercomputer currently under construction at the
CINECA
Cineca is a non-profit consortium, made up of 69 Italian universities, 27 national public research centres, the Italian Ministry of Universities and Research (MUR) and the Italian Ministry of Education (MI), and was established in 1969 in Casalecc ...
datacenter in
Bologna
Bologna (, , ; egl, label=Emilian language, Emilian, Bulåggna ; lat, Bononia) is the capital and largest city of the Emilia-Romagna region in Northern Italy. It is the seventh most populous city in Italy with about 400,000 inhabitants and 1 ...
,
Italy
Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...
. The system consists of an
Atos
Atos is a European multinational information technology (IT) service and consulting company headquartered in Bezons, France and offices worldwide. It specialises in hi-tech transactional services, unified communications, cloud, big data and ...
BullSequana XH2000 computer, with close to 14,000
Nvidia
Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...
Ampere GPUs
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobil ...
and 200Gb/s Nvidia
Mellanox
Mellanox Technologies Ltd. ( he, מלאנוקס טכנולוגיות בע"מ) was an Israeli-American multinational supplier of computer networking products based on InfiniBand and Ethernet technology. Mellanox offered adapters, switches, softwa ...
HDR
InfiniBand
InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also use ...
connectivity. Once completed, Leonardo will be capable of 250
petaflops
In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate meas ...
(250 quadrillion operations per second), which will make it one of the top five fastest supercomputers in the world. Leonardo's components arrived on site in July 2022, and it is scheduled to begin operations by the end of summer 2022.
Architecture
The system is constructed as three separate "modules". The first, known as the "booster module", consists of 13,824
Nvidia A100 GPUs, grouped four per node, for a total of 3,456 nodes. This module will be capable of 240.50
LINPACK petaflops, and is expected to be online by autumn 2022. The second module, called the "data centric module", is made up of 1,536
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
Sapphire Rapids
Sapphire Rapids is a codename for Intel's server (fourth generation Xeon Scalable) and workstation processors based on Intel 7.
Sapphire Rapids was intended as part of the Eagle Stream server platform. In addition, it will be powering Aurora, a ...
CPUs
A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, and ...
, and will be capable of 8.97 LINPACK petaflops. These two computing modules will be complemented by a "front-end & service module", and backed by two storage systems; 5 PB of high
IOPS
Input/output operations per second (IOPS, pronounced ''eye-ops'') is an input/output performance measurement used to characterize computer storage devices like hard disk drives (HDD), solid state drives (SSD), and storage area networks (SAN). Lik ...
storage with 1 TB/s bandwidth and 100 PB of high capacity storage with 500 GB/s bandwidth. The components will be joined up by a 200 Gb/s
InfiniBand
InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also use ...
interconnect.
Booster Module
The 3,456 individual nodes which make up the "booster module" are custom
BullSequana X2135 "Da Vinci"
blade servers
A blade server is a stripped-down server computer with a modular design optimized to minimize the use of physical space and energy. Blade servers have many components removed to save space, minimize power consumption and other considerations, whi ...
, each composed of:
* 1x
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
Xeon
Xeon ( ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded system markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same a ...
8358 CPU, with 32 cores running at 2.6 GHz
* 512 GB
RAM
Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to:
Animals
* A male sheep
* Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish
People
* Ram (given name)
* Ram (surname)
* Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director
* RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch
* ...
DDR4 3200 MHz
* 4x NVidia custom Ampere GPU, 64GB HBM2
* 2x NVidia HDR InfiniBand network adapters, each with two 100 Gb/s ports
Each node is expected to deliver 89.4 TFLOPs peak.
Data Centric Module
The "data centric module" consists of 1536 nodes, each comprising a BullSequana X2610 compute blade with:
* 2x Intel
Sapphire Rapids
Sapphire Rapids is a codename for Intel's server (fourth generation Xeon Scalable) and workstation processors based on Intel 7.
Sapphire Rapids was intended as part of the Eagle Stream server platform. In addition, it will be powering Aurora, a ...
CPUs, with 56 cores
* 512 GB RAM DDR5 4800 MHz
* 1x NVidia HDR InfiniBand network adapter, with one 100 Gb/s port
* 8 TB NVM storage
Front-end & Service Module
This module is responsible for login handling, visualisation and system service and management. It consists of 16 nodes, each having:
* 2x
Ice Lake CPUs, with 32 cores
* 512 GB RAM
* 1x NVidia HDR InfiniBand network adapter, with two 100 Gb/s ports
* 6 TB disk storage in
RAID-1
In computer storage, the standard RAID levels comprise a basic set of RAID ("redundant array of independent disks" or "redundant array of inexpensive disks") configurations that employ the techniques of striping, mirroring, or parity to create lar ...
configuration
16 additional nodes are also equipped with:
* 2x NVidia
Quadro
Quadro was Nvidia's brand for graphics cards intended for use in workstations running professional computer-aided design (CAD), computer-generated imagery (CGI), digital content creation (DCC) applications, scientific calculations and machine ...
RTX8000 48GB (for
visualisations)
* 6.4 TB
NVMe
NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) is an open, logical-device interface specification for accessing a computer's non-volatile storage media usually attached via PCI Express (PCIe) bus. The ...
disk array
Storage
Leonardo will have access to two storage tiers:
* A "fast" tier based on 31x
DDN Exascaler ES400NVX2 appliances, each with 24x 7.68 TB
NVMe
NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) is an open, logical-device interface specification for accessing a computer's non-volatile storage media usually attached via PCI Express (PCIe) bus. The ...
SSDs
A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functioning as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is a ...
* A "capacity" tier based on 31x DDN EXAScaler SFA799X appliances, with 82x 18 TB
HDD SAS 7200 rpm and two
JBOD
The most widespread standard for configuring multiple hard disk drives is RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive/Independent Disks), which comes in a number of standard configurations and non-standard configurations. Non-RAID drive architectures a ...
expansions per appliance, each with 82x 18 TB HDD SAS 7200 rpm
Funding
Leonardo is part of the
European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, and receives €120 million in funding from the
EU. This is matched by a further €120 million from the Italian
Ministry of Education, University and Research
The Ministry of Education, University and Research (in it, Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Università e della Ricerca, italic=no or MIUR) is the ministry of the Italian government for the national education system, the Italian universities and ...
.
Bologna Technopole
The building housing Leonardo is known as the Bologna Technopole, and used to be home to a tobacco factory. It was built in 1952 by
Pier Luigi Nervi
Pier Luigi Nervi (21 June 1891 – 9 January 1979) was an Italian engineer and architect. He studied at the University of Bologna graduating in 1913. Nervi taught as a professor of engineering at Rome University from 1946 to 1961 and is known wor ...
, who was famous for his innovative use of
reinforced concrete. In addition to Leonardo, the building also houses the
European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts
The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is an independent intergovernmental organisation supported by most of the nations of Europe. It is based at three sites: Shinfield Park, Reading, United Kingdom; Bologna, Italy; an ...
' new supercomputer, consisting of four Atos BullSequana XH2000 clusters, which replaces their earlier facility in
Reading
Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of letters, symbols, etc., especially by sight or touch.
For educators and researchers, reading is a multifaceted process involving such areas as word recognition, orthography (spelling ...
,
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
.
[{{Cite web , last=Smolaks , first=Max , date=June 23, 2017 , title=Italy chosen to host meteorological supercomputer , url=https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/italy-chosen-to-host-meteorological-supercomputer/ , access-date=2022-08-11 , website=www.datacenterdynamics.com , language=en]
See also
*
LUMI
Lumi may refer to:
Computing
* Lumi (software), chemical analysis software
* Lumi masking, a technique used by video compression software
* LUMI, a supercomputer located in Finland
Music
* ''Lumi'' (album), a 1987 album by Edward Vesala
...
, another EuroHPC supercomputer based in
Kajaani
Kajaani (; sv, Kajana) is the most populous town and the capital of the Kainuu Region of Finland. It is located southeast of Lake Oulu (Oulujärvi), which drains into the Gulf of Bothnia through the Oulu River (Oulujoki). As of , it had a pop ...
,
Finland
Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of B ...
.
*
EuroHPC (European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking).
References
Supercomputers
Supercomputing in Europe