Consortium

CINECA (Interuniversity Consortium established by law in 1969) is a private body. Its institutional mission is to support research conducted by the Italian scientific community through supercomputing and its applications. CINECA is a Consortium of 37 Italian Universities, the CNR - National Research Council, the OGS- National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics and the MIUR - Ministry of University and Research. The present supercomputing facility is based on integrated infrastructure of more than 15.000 processors. The state of the art HPC system is an IBM Power 6 supercomputer with 168 nodes, each with 32 cores and 128 GB of RAM memory. The interconnection network is based on DDR Infiniband technology and the storage accounts for 1.8 PTbytes of storage. The aggregate peak power is 100 TFlops. Besides that, CINECA runs a IBM Blue Gene P with 1024 CPU quad core and a power of 14 TFlops. The data centre of CINECA is equipped to provide business continuity technology. Besides the national scientific supercomputing facility CINECA manages and exploits the supercomputing facility of ENI, the Italian Energy company, which is an integrated facility of up to 10.000 processors. CINECA has a long experience in HPC code parallelisation and optimisation and in providing education and training in the different fields of parallel computing and computational sciences. CINECA plays an active role in various national and EC-funded R&D and infrastructure projects on different aspects of HPC and Grid computing. CINECA is member of the DEISA2 Execomm in DEISA and coordinates HPC-Europa2 and HPCWorld.

Sanzio Bassini, Director of the newly formed System & Technology Department that is in charge of the whole CINECA data-centre infrastructure and services management.