The Italian university consortium CINECA has announced Leonardo, a new supercomputer thanks to which it will be possible to have a processing power of 10 exaflops in FP16 for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. It is the most powerful supercomputer in the world for Artificial Intelligence calculations. And Nvidia will be in charge of supplying hardware components for its development.
The heart of this system is integrated with 14,000 NVIDIA GPUs of the Ampere family. In addition, the company will also supply the project with NVIDIA Mellanox HDR 200 Gb/s Infiniband network structure for low latency broadband connections between the different clusters.
EuroHPC is the body that commissioned the creation of the Leonardo supercomputer. It is a collaboration between the European Union and national governments aimed at developing a supercomputer infrastructure in Europe, financed by the European Commission through the intervention of the Ministry of University and Italian Research.
Leonardo is going to use for medical research like research work on drugs, in particular linked to the studies for a vaccine for COVID-19 as well as for other diseases. Leonardo’s computing power will also be used to model weather forecasts faster and with greater precision than what is currently obtainable, as well as aggregating data from various sources (electromagnetic waves, gravitational waves, and neutrinos) in order to perform a more complex and detailed study of the universe.
Leonardo is part of a group of four supercomputers, with the others planned to be installed in the Czech Republic, Luxembourg, and Slovenia, designed in particular to accelerate the processing of Artificial Intelligence.
Once in production, they will form a regional computing network in Europe, which will be integrated in the future with four other systems financed by EuroHPC installed in Bulgaria, Finland, Portugal, and Spain expected in production for the next few years.
