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Very little is missing. A matter of weeks and 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, they say from the headquarters. A significant novelty if you think that it will be able to offer a capacity of 250 Petaflops per secondor 100 Petabytes of storage capacity and should be between the third and fifth position in the TOP500. To date, however, Italy is present in the TOP500 ranking with Eni’s Italian HPC5 Supercomputer which occupies the 12th position with an Rm of 35PFs and Rp of 51PFs.

Work has been underway at the Bologna technopole for months: 30 trucks, 157 racks, 4,993 servers, weighing a total of 360,000 kilos, and hundreds of kilometres of cables. In short
An incredible feat. Suffice it to say that the supercomputer will be capable of performing as many as 250 trillion operations per second. The Leonardo system, based on Atos Sequana XH2000 technology, as we have already written, will have a computational power of almost 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 information exchange between processing units that is crucial for addressing frontier scientific challenges. Leonardo, in fact, will provide 10 times the computing power of the current
flagship Cineca Marconi system100
.

But what can the supercomputer do? For example, world climate simulations with a resolution of one kilometer and will be capable of a higher simulation speed. This characteristic, in fact, is very important in the context of natural disasters in which it is critical to be able to have answers in a very short time.
As we said earlier, what will be implemented by Leonardo is not the only supercomputer in Italy. The Supercomputer built by Leonardo at the Bologna technopole will be
managed by Cineca
. This is why to understand the importance of this project it is necessary to specify who Cineca is. It is a non-profit consortium, made up of 69 Italian universities, 27 national public research centers, the
Ministry of University and Research (MUR)
and the
Ministry of Education (MIUR),
and was established in 1969 in Casalecchio di Reno, in the province of Bologna.

But CINECA is also the body appointed by the Italian Government that acts as the National Center for research in high performance computing, big data and quantum computing coordinated by the
National Institute of Nuclear Physics
. In short, a project managed by an institution within which there are great professionalism and skills. Finally, it is important to specify where this incredible project was born and who finances it. The Leonardo supercomputer is co-financed with 240 million euros by
the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking
, and
the Ministry of University and Research
. It will be one of the resources of the National Research Center in High Performance Computing, Big Data and Quantum Computing funded by the
PNRR
and recently established.