Academic Supercomputing in Europe

Italy

Statistics

Population: 58.1 million
GDP/capita: € 23,300

Policy

The organisations involved in making the HPC policy are the Ministry for Education, University and Research (MIUR), the National Research Council (CNR), the Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment (ENEA) and the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN).

MIUR finances several supercomputing centres and the backbone of the high-performance research network. MIUR has established a National Strategic Program (FIRB program) for Information Society.

ENEA has invested in massively parallel computing platforms of the Italian Quadrics technology. INFN, in the frame of its particle physics research program, has started up the APEmille project.

The university consortia, which operate supercomputer centres are: CINECA in Bologna, which provides a national service, CILEA in Milan, principally in support to Lombard universities, and CASPUR in Rome, which serves the universities of Rome and of South Italy.

Supercomputing facilities for the academia

CASPUR (Rome): IBM pSeries (690/64 + 670/16), IBM SP Power3/70, HP Alphacluster/60, HP cluster (16 Itanium2/900-1000-1500), Beowulf cluster (50 Opteron/2000), NEC SX-6/8
CILEA: Beowulf cluster (256 Xeon/3060), HP SuperDome/64, HP V2500/20, 2´HP N4000/8
CINECA: IBM p5-575/512, IBM cluster (1024 Xeon/3060), Compaq AlphaServer/128, SGI Altix 3700/64, HP cluster (64 Itanium2/1400)
ENEA (Casaccia): Compaq cluster/80
ENEA (Frascati): IBM cluster (16 P4/2400)
INFN (Napels): Beowulf cluster (198 Athlon/2200), Beowulf cluster (14 Xeon/2800)
INFN (Rome): Alenia APE/2048
University of Cosenza: HP Alphaserver/64, NEC TX-7/16, HP cluster (24 Itanium2/1500)
University of Lecce: HP cluster (128 Itanium2/1400)
University of Napels: HP cluster (128 Itanium2/1400), Beowulf cluster (19 P4/1500), Beowulf cluster (19 P4/1500)
University of Pisa: Beowulf cluster (26 Athlon/1800 + 28 Athlon/1200)

The figure below shows the peak performance of the #1 Italian system and the total performance of Italian HPC systems during the last 5 years.

National academic network

GARR is the Italian network for research and education to which all Italian universities and main R&D centres are connected. GARR has a 2.5 Gbps backbone. The connection to GÉANT is 10 Gbps.

The 2005 budget for the GARR network is € 33 million.

http://www.garr.it/

National GRIDs

A € 30 million project that started in 2000 has resulted in the INFN LHC grid, an infrastructure primarily devised for LHC calculations.

MIUR has provided € 3 million for SPACI (Southern Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructures), a grid infrastructure in Southern Italy. The principal nodes are Lecce, Napels and Cosenza.

The GRID.IT project in which six centers participate will create in the period 2002-2005 several grid test-beds. MIUR granted € 8.1 million to the project.

http://www.grid.it/

Acquisition and upgrade plans

INFN (Pisa): Cray XD1 ordered.

List of abbreviations

CASPUR Consortium for Supercomputer Applications in University and Research, Rome
CILEA Consorzio Interuniversitario Lombardo per l'Elaborazione Automatica (Consortium of 7 universities in Milan, Bergamo, Brescia and Pavia), Milan
CINECA Centro di Calculo Interuniversitario dell'Italia Nord-Orientale (Consortium of universities in Bologna, Firenze, Padova, Venezia, Modena, Parma, Ferrara, Trieste, Ancona, Catania, Siena, Triento and Udine), Bologna
CNR Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
ENEA Ente per le Nuove Tecnologie, l'Energia e l'Ambiente (Institute for New Technologies, Energy and Environment), Rome
INFN National Institute for Nuclear Physics, Rome
MIUR Ministry for Education, Universities and Research

Contacts and Addresses

Giovanni Erbacci
CINECA
Via Magnanelli 6/3
40031 Casalecchio di Reno (Bologna)
email: g.erbacci@cineca.it

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