The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking builds a new supercomputer in Italy, the first in a series of totally eight within this partnership.
On 27 November 2019, the eight hosting countries of the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (Euro HPC) signed an agreement to start the procurement process for the acquisition, installation and maintenance of new supercomputers (see SwissCore article). Euro HPC planned to have the first of these computers operational by the second half of 2020.
This ambitious goal may now be at least partly achieved. On 19 October, Euro HPC together with CINECA, a leading supercomputing centre and non-profit consortium of 69 Italian universities, 21 national institutions and the Italian Ministries of Universities and Research, and of Education, announced its award to a vendor. The new world class supercomputer called LEONARDO is powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and will be built by the French company Atos on the premises of CINECA’s new data centre in Bologna. LEONARDO will have a dizzying computing power, which will allow it to execute more than 248 Petaflops or more than 248 million calculations per second. Its properties place LEONARDO among the top computers of the world and allow paving the way for the next generation of exascale computing (1 billion calculations per second). Italy is the first of the eight chosen Euro HPC sites, where building of a supercomputer starts. Seven more computers will follow in the coming months in Bulgaria, Czechia, Finland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain.
The launch of LEONARDO follows a boost for Euro HPC in September (see SwissCore article). In her address on the State of the Union, President of the European Commission (EC) Ursula von der Leyen, had announced an investment of € 8 billion into the next generation of supercomputers made in Europe. Shortly after, EC Executive Vice-President for A Europe Fit for the Digital Age Margrethe Vestager presented the EC proposal for a new Regulation of Euro HPC. The joint undertaking will continue its operation as an institutionalised European Partnership under Horizon Europe.