Italy’s National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA) has chosen Lenovo for its new HPC cluster, dubbed CRESCO8.
Set to be housed at the agency’s hub in Portici, Naples, the supercomputer will be used to accelerate research activities on clean energy, in particular on nuclear fusion.
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It consists of 758 nodes with 2 Intel Xeon Platinum 8592+ CPUs, meaning the cluster will bring the compute power of CRESCO (Computational Center for Research on Complex Systems) from its current 1.01 petaflops to more than 6.5 petaflops.
This will make CRESCO, the name given to the supercomputing clusters hosted in the Portici Research Center, one of the most powerful systems in Italy in terms of processing power.
In addition to the main CRESCO clusters, ENEA also hosts HPC systems at facilities in Frascati and Casaccia. All of the agency’s computing resources are integrated into ENEAGRID, the infrastructure providing access to the computational resources of ENEA.
By using Lenovo Neptune Direct Water-Cooling technology, ENEA said it has been able to capture up to 98 percent of the heat produced by the supercomputer. It also noted that because all the Lenovo hardware used for the installation was entirely made in its factory in Hungary, the infrastructure hasn’t had as far to travel, reducing transport emissions.
“The new supercomputer CRESCO8 represents an important technological advance for ENEA, increasing computing resources with cutting-edge systems from the point of view of parallel computing, which at the same time guarantee high levels of energy efficiency,” said Giovanni Ponti, head of ENEA’s ICT Division of the Department of Energy Technologies and Renewable Sources.
He added: “CRESCO8 will allow ENEA researchers and all its research partners to be able to perform numerical codes, computational models, simulations, and artificial intelligence algorithms in a next-generation high-performance parallel computing cluster, capable of responding to the new needs of the scientific community and research projects.”
