Italy has launched its Cassandra supercomputer at the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC) in Lecce, Italy.

First reported by the Register, Cassandra is based on Lenovo’s liquid-cooled Neptune system and features more than 180 nodes.

The GPU-accelerated cluster will have 20,160 Xeon Max CPU cores, 26TB of memory, and is expected to produce 1.2 petaflops of performance when it comes online later this year.

The Cassandra system will likely target HPC workloads and CMCC plans on adding a pair of GPU nodes totaling 16 Nvidia H100 accelerators for AI workloads.

Founded in 2005, the CMCC is a body formed by Italy’s ministries of environment, finance, agriculture, and forestry. The CMCC develops forecast models of the Earth and the oceans, establishing policies in the face of climate change.

The CMCC currently conducts its work on the Juno system, which was deployed in 2022 and is based on Intel’s third-gen Xeon Scalable Platform.

Earlier this month, the UK launched its Isambard-AI supercomputer at the University of Bristol.