An all-Italian partnership made up of Enea and cineca, the inter-university computing consortium, has won the international selection to provide supercomputing and data storage services to Eurofusion, the European Consortium for the Development of Fusion Energy. Until 2018 they will make 'Marconi Fusion', a partition of the main Italian research computer installed at the Cineca headquarters in Casalecchio di Reno (Bologna), available to the international scientific community. Marconi Fusion will replace the previous high-performance computing system provided by the Helios supercomputer at the International Fusion Energy Center in Rokkasho, Japan.
Supercomputing services are essential to research on nuclear fusion to arrive at the production of electricity from this source by the middle of the century. A crucial role in this area is covered by the computational modeling of plasma and materials, as a validation of the experimental results produced by the ITER machine and as a basis for the design of the new generation DEMO machine. The progress made in this sector in recent years has been particularly significant and has led EUROFUSION to invest 30 million euros every 5 years for the renewal of the computing infrastructures and the financing of the related support activities.
According to an Enea press release, Cineca's overall development plan for Marconi envisages investments of 50 million euros in two phases. Currently, 806 of the approximately 1.500 Marconi nodes are dedicated to the merger, for a computing power of over 1 Pflops; by the end of the year an 11 Pflops section will be added, based on Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing and in July 2017 the peak performance will reach 20 Pflops with 17 PByte of storage and an electrical power of about 3 MWatt.
“Through this partnership – underlined the President of ENEA Federico Testa and the Director of Cineca David Vannozzi – we share the task of providing a service of absolute excellence to a European scientific community among the most leading ones on the world scene, ensuring the solution of the problems both of a scientific type and of a more purely operational type. Enea and Cineca intend to seize this opportunity to strengthen mutual collaboration and to consolidate the relationship with Eurofusion in a long-term perspective".
