Galileo100, one of Cineca‘s Tier-1 supercomputers capable of serving over 5,000 users, is on the brink of a significant boost. This system, the largest Italian cloud dedicated to public scientific research, is set to evolve significantly, with a more than 20-fold increase in computational resources, opening up a world of possibilities for the users.
The upgrade will be carried out in partnership with E4 Computer Engineering, Dell, and VAST Data, three excellences in hardware and software that won the CINECA-organized tender.
Among the essential requirements for the new infrastructure, CINECA indicated the ability to increase the number of vCPUs available for VM services by at least ten times, the ability to balance the increase in the number of vCPUs with adequate storage, and multi-protocol storage infrastructure (files, blocks, objects) for long-term data storage and interactive processing.
From a technological point of view, a data management platform will be developed based on a multi-protocol datalake, realised with flash technology and distributed over 2 data centres. This platform will be used for data management and processing for scientific and AI applications. Dell PowerEdge HS7710 solutions will be used for the CPU nodes, and Dell PowerEdge R760xa solutions (Nvidia L40s and Nvidia A30 PCIe GPUs) for the GPU nodes.
“The Galileo100 upgrade project will bring about a significant advancement and diversification of the computational resources made available to Italian and European researchers,” says Sanzio Bassini, director of the supercomputing department of the CINECA inter-university consortium. “The project envisages a significant renewal of the computing infrastructure providing virtualisation, analysis and data visualisation services to provide users with a new cloud infrastructure for research – on a national and European scale – with computational resources and the necessary flexibility to enable the effective realisation of platforms dedicated to frontier scientific projects, in the fields of AI, Digital Twin, weather-climate, Industry 4.0, and all the main computational sciences.“
The upgrade of the Galileo100 system is being financed through various national projects of relevance. These include the Terabit Project (from the National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics – OGS), the MEET project (from the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology – INGV), the ICSC National Centre (CN HPC – Datalake shared), and the PNC D34Health project. This upgrade will enhance various scientific communities’ research and analysis capacity, making Galileo100 an essential resource in their respective fields.
The commitment of E4 Computer Engineering, together with Dell and VAST Data, allows the most advanced technologies to be put at the service of CINECA and, therefore, of the scientific community, supporting innovation and research development in Italy and worldwide.
