BOLOGNA, Italy and ARMONK,
N.Y., July 7, 2020
/PRNewswire/ -- IBM [NYSE: IBM] and CINECA, Italy's national high-performance computing
consortium, made up of the Ministry of Universities and
Research (MIUR), 69 Italian universities and 11 national
public Institutions, consolidated their long-standing collaboration
with the new Marconi100 supercomputer, the 9th most powerful
supercomputer in the world, and the 2nd most powerful in
Europe, according to the most
recent iteration of the Top500 ranking.
The new system was built by IBM using the same IBM POWER9
technology and NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs as the world's smartest
AI supercomputer, the US Department of Energy's Summit system, and
according to measurements conducted by CINECA, offers nearly 32
theoretical peak petaFLOPS of computing power, or up to 32
quadrillion calculations per second.
With Marconi100, CINECA reaffirms its mission as a leading
supercomputing research center with a new Tier0 supercomputer, the
highest-performing classification for European systems. Marconi100
will support European researchers, through the
PRACE initiative, and Italian researchers through the Italian
Supercomputing Resource Allocation initiative (ISCRA), equipping
them with additional computing resources to face the socioeconomic
challenges of our time such as climate change, renewable energy,
sustainable economics, and precision medicine.
In addition, by drastically cutting the time to insights through
digital simulation, supercomputing can accelerate knowledge and
decision support and can be of great help in dealing with risk
management situations, like measuring environmental impact, or
crisis management situations such as earthquakes or other extreme
events like the current pandemic.
In particular, one of the first projects for Marconi100 is
research around COVID-19 therapies that are able to reduce the
pathogenic aggressiveness of the virus. For example, it will
digitally simulate the behavior of proteins that allow the virus to
replicate to better identify molecules and pharmaceutical compounds
able to inhibit it. CINECA is already a partner in many projects at
both national and international levels and participates in the
Exscalate4CoV project, funded by the European Commission under
emergency procedure.
"The Marconi100 project is part of a long, fruitful
collaboration with the Inter-university Consortium involving also
our centers of excellence in Europe," said Enrico
Cereda, GM, IBM Italy. "With the same technology as two of
the top three supercomputers in the world, Marconi100 will follow
in their footsteps and offer the community of researchers the
computing power necessary to accelerate the discovery of a cure
against COVID-19. As the activity of the Summit system shows,
without the availability of these architectures it would take much
longer, incompatible with the urgent need to find a solution. We
are proud to be at CINECA's side, and the country's, in this and
other important scientific challenges."
"With the installation of the Marconi100 accelerated cluster,
the Marconi project is completed for the persistent evolution of
the CINECA calculation system started in 2016 which, today, allows
us to have an aggregate computing power of about 50 petaflops. The
Marconi100 partition, with the experience gained by IBM with the US
Department of Energy's Summit and Sierra projects, will allow us to
provide the national and European scientific community access to a
supercomputing system of great production stability and high
quality of service," President of CINECA Eugenio Di Sciascio said.
"This confirms the centrality of the CINECA Consortium in the
development of research in the academic and industrial field as it
happens with Exscalate4CoV, a project led by the pharmaceutical
company Dompé, engaged in research and evaluation of proteins for
the fight against coronavirus," CINECA GM David Vannozzi said.
CINECA is partner of more than 20 international projects for the
development of the European HPC infrastructure and its
technological and application ecosystem, in the field of plasma
physics with the Eurofusion project, whose aim is to determine a
significant progress in fusion energy production; in matter and
materials science with the MAX - Material Science at Exascale
project; in industrial engineering with the Exellerat Engineering
project; in solid earth physics with the Cheese Solid Earth
project: projects that will benefit from the high processing
capacity provided by Marconi100.
IBM POWER9 Accelerates Discovery
The design and integration of the Marconi100 accelerated cluster
are the result of IBM's experience building the world's two
smartest AI supercomputers: the US Dept of Energy's Summit and
Sierra.
Similar to these two systems, the architecture of Marconi100
uses IBM POWER9 processors and NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs as well
as high-performance NVIDIA Mellanox InfiniBand interconnect in a
high-performance, high-scalability Dragonfly+ topology. Marconi100
also benefits from eight petabytes of IBM Elastic Storage Server
with IBM Spectrum Scale to sustain high-performance IO throughput
and offer a balanced computational and IO architecture.
The use of an accelerated computing architecture is anticipated
to improve productivity for many applications, affecting a
significant performance increase at both at the individual server
node level as well as an aggregated cluster connected through the
high-performance InfiniBand network.
In terms of energy sustainability, the increased processing
power will not lead to an increase in consumption. The new system
will be able to count on greater energy efficiency for the same
processing capacity by a factor equal to about three times CINECA's
pre-existing system.
Sam Ponedal
sponeda@us.ibm.com
916-217-0145
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SOURCE IBM