The Leonardo supercomputer is located in Bologna, within the under-construction Tecnopolo. It is considered the largest Italian supercomputer and a world-class leader in computing. Leonardo is part of a significant European initiative to enhance computational capacity across Europe, supporting research and innovation efforts.
Key Specifications
Computing Units
The Leonardo will have two basic processing modules: Booster and Data Centric.
- Booster Module: Equipped with dedicated NVIDIA Ampere A100 SXM6 64GB GPUs.
- Data Centric Module: Equipped with two next-generation Intel Sapphire Rapids 56-core processors per blade. These high-performance processors are optimized for intense computational workloads, ensuring close-to-100% sustained utilization.
Network
Leonardo’s data network is powered by a Dragonfly+ topology and driven by NVIDIA Mellanox HDR 200 Gb/s InfiniBand interconnects. This configuration provides ultra-low latency and very high data throughput: over 25,000 fiber cables and more than 800 network switches interconnect the whole infrastructure.
Storage
Leonardo’s storage ecosystem includes:The architecture offers a main memory-to-storage capacity ratio of 66, comparable to the best class of HPC systems.
Fast Tier: 1.4 TB/s aggregate bandwidth from the flash memory.
Capacity Tier: Provides 106 PB storage, yielding over 600 GB/s in bandwidth.
Integration
Based on the BullSequana X2000 solution by Eviden, Leonardo integrates GPU and CPU onto dense compute blades. This infrastructure provides the basis for high-performance computing, data analytics, AI, and machine learning model development. Energy efficiency is achieved through direct liquid cooling, extracting 95% of the heat dissipated within a rack and cooling all critical components.
Leonardo Supercomputer: Core Components Driving Its Power and Efficiency
The Leonardo supercomputer stands out due to its advanced components, contributing to its remarkable computational power and efficiency. Here are its main features:
- Computing Units: Includes 5,000 computing nodes, equipped with a total of 14,000 Nvidia Ampere GPUs and 3,500 Intel Xeon processors, providing immense processing capabilities.
- Cooling System: Utilizes liquid cooling to maintain optimal temperatures, with cold water circulating through pipes to the GPUs and CPUs.
- Memory: Boasts approximately 3 petabytes of RAM and 150 petabytes of ROM, allowing it to handle vast amounts of data efficiently.
- Network Connection: Employs a Dragonfly network, ensuring direct node-to-node connections, which enhances calculation efficiency and speed.
These components collectively deliver unprecedented computational power, making Leonardo one of the most advanced supercomputers globally.
Performance and Impact
Since the burst of data starts both from numerical models and sensors, it requires strong processing and storage services. Leonardo is one of the most powerful supercomputing systems in the world, able to provide a performance of more than 250 Petaflops—more than 250 quadrillions of operations per second. It is astonishing to notice that each rack with GPUs provides computational power equivalent to the BlueGene/Q Fermi system (retired in 2015).
Leonardo represents 80% of the total computing power of all Italy, making it an essential technological infrastructure. This capability ranks Leonardo as a unique resource for scientific research, industrial innovation, and data-intensive applications. It features an advanced architecture powered by 14,000 Nvidia Ampere GPUs and 3,500 Intel Xeon processors, driving applications in climate modeling, bioinformatics, and AI. Leonardo is at the forefront of computing in Italy and plays a crucial role in national and European development for high-performance computing and sustainability.
Objectives of Leonardo supercomputer
- Support Computational Power for Researchers: Leonardo aims to enhance computational capabilities for Italian and European researchers, boosting scientific excellence and industrial strength across Europe.
- Ensure European Sovereignty in Innovative Technologies: High-performance computing (HPC) is vital for advancing research throughout the European Union, ensuring leadership in technological innovation.
- Address Urgent Social Challenges: Leonardo is a crucial tool for understanding and responding to complex social issues, transforming them into opportunities for innovation and progress.
Financials and Location
Financials
The construction of the Leonardo supercomputer cost €140 million. This amount was jointly funded by the European Union and the Italian government, with contributions from the Ministry of Education and the National Institute for Nuclear Physics. Leonardo is part of a major European initiative to boost computing capacity in Europe, playing a vital role in supporting research and innovation.
Location: Tecnopolo of Bologna
The Tecnopolo of Bologna, initiated by the Emilia Romagna Region and MUR, has emerged as a significant national and international project. The successful collaboration led to the ECMWF council’s decision to relocate its data center to Bologna and host INFN’s main data center. With ECMWF, CINECA, and INFN data centers, the Tecnopolo is a major European hub for computing and data processing. The Tecnopolo will also house:
- The Enea Research Center for renewable energy and circular economy.
- The Italian Meteorological Agency.
- A University of Bologna research center.
- Rizzoli Orthopedic Institute’s biobanks.
- The Bi-REX Competence Center for Industry 4.0.
- Spaces for training and events.
This development positions it as a leading international hub for the digital economy, big data, climate change, and supercomputing, supported by regional, European, and national investments.
Leonardo and AI: Connections
The Leonardo supercomputer lies at the heart of evolution in artificial intelligence, serving as a powerful tool for research into AI and applications.
AI Research and Development
- AI Algorithms: Leonardo utilizes vast computational power in advanced AI algorithms and extensive data processing, boosting machine learning, neural networks, and deep learning research.
Big Data Analysis
- Data Processing: AI requires processing huge amounts of data. Leonardo’s high-performance computing capability allows for fast and efficient data analysis, a key component of training AI models.
Simulation and Modeling
- AI Applications: Most AI applications rely on simulations and predictive modeling. Leonardo’s capacity to run extensive simulations aids in developing more accurate and reliable AI systems.
Interdisciplinary Applications
- Research Across Domains: Leonardo supports AI research across diverse fields, overboosting such as health, climate science, and engineering, fostering innovative solutions and progress.
Advanced infrastructure like Leonardo significantly accelerates AI research and its applications, becoming a game changer of technological innovation and progress in AI.
Check out the video of an important italian vlogger into the core the of Leonardo super PC in Bologna .
Future Developments of the Leonardo Supercomputer
A Glimpse into the Future
Leonardo is part of the EuroHPC initiative and was designed to rank among the world’s top supercomputers. Its current capabilities are impressive, but the future holds even more potential.
Higher Computational Power
- Enhanced Hardware: Performance will rise with planned hardware enhancements, including more advanced processors and accelerators. This will enable researchers to perform more complex simulations and analyses at greater speed and accuracy.
Advanced AI Integration
- AI and ML Algorithms: Leonardo’s integration with AI and machine learning algorithms will further improve data processing and pattern recognition, becoming a mainstay in AI model and application development.
Energy Efficiency and Sustainability
- Cooling Technologies: Future updates will enhance energy efficiency, incorporating next-generation cooling technologies and power optimization to reduce the ecological footprint.
More Accessibility and Collaboration
- Open-Access Research: Leonardo will increase accessibility for a broader range of researchers and institutions, promoting international cooperation and innovation.
Next-Generation Applications
- New Research Opportunities: Leonardo’s growing capabilities will enable new research in areas such as quantum computing, material sciences, and space exploration.
Looking Ahead
As Leonardo continues to evolve, its impact on science and technology will be profound. Future developments will push boundaries in computational power, driving groundbreaking research and innovation. Leonardo will remain a cornerstone of high-performance computing and a catalyst for scientific discovery.
Benefits to Humanity
Benefits of the Leonardo Supercomputer
Technological Innovation: Facilitates advances in AI, big data, and industrial applications, promoting economic growth and technological development.
Scientific Advancement: Supports research in areas like medicine and climate science, fostering new discoveries and innovations.
Addressing Global Challenges: Helps simulate and understand complex phenomena such as climate change, natural disasters, and pandemics, providing mitigation strategies.
Education and Training Provision: A vital tool for higher education institutions, offering resources for training future scientists and engineers.
CONCLUSION
Leonardo is key to expanding human knowledge and solving global challenges, acting as a driver of scientific, technological, and educational progress.
In summation.
In its turn, the new supercomputer Leonardo will make another strong step toward enhancing the computational capacity both in Italy and in Europe, assisting scientific research and the building of technologies that tackle global challenges with a hardware setup of 14. The computation power is over 250 Petaflops, letting the system perform fast and efficient complex simulations and analyses. It hugely facilitates research in climate science, biological data analytics, and AI development.
Fully developed with the most advanced infrastructure available, Leonardo is, therefore, capable of supporting numerous interdisciplinary applications in various subjects ranging from health, materials sciences, and engineering research to space. Big data processing becomes an important push for progress in artificial intelligence research and development, as it is responsible for processing volumes of instantaneous data. Areas where computational performance plays a critical role toward success. Additionally, Leonardo accelerates investigations; moreover, his crucial contribution to the promotion of European technological independence is what ensures Europe’s stronghold on innovation. It is Leonardo’s role at the Tecnopolo in Bologna, though, that bears so much more significance based on Italy’s position in the supercomputing arena, acting to become a pivotal point in data processing and supercomputing through collaborations at an international and inter-institutional level that will link several research centers with academic institutions including those of industrial and government entities.
In other words, the future is bright: Leonardo grows stronger by being more and more computationally powerful, and greener with new cooling techniques along with methods that save energy. This will lead to the development of an increased accessibility state for many more researchers from cooperating institutions and from different parts of the world through the promotion of collaboration among various institutions and making available more resources for high-performance computing to users.
In short, Leonardo represents the increase in supercomputers to boost scientific discovery and help to solve most of the global problems that stand up today. He places his team as the cornerstone that needs to be brought forward in a sustainable way so that growth and advancement can take place.
......who knows what the real Leonardo would think of this project dedicated to him.
