PRACE-Italy

PRACE (ESFRI infrastructure) provides supercomputing resources (high performance computing, HPC) and data management for European research. The national references of PRACE are Cineca and OGS, which collaborate in the PRACE-Italy initiative, high priority research infrastructure included in the National Plan for Research Infrastructures 2021-2027. PRACE-Italy main goals are:

• Promote collaboration with the national ICT industry to create innovative computing architectures and establish a Data-Centric Exascale Lab with open access to the scientific community and strongly linked to the impact on the countrywide system.
• Support the growth of expertise and methodologies in the HPC field for the development and use of innovative algorithms in the field of Earth Sciences for the purposes of access to and use of Exascale architectures.
• Support researcher training and capacity building, especially in the field of HPC applications for Earth Sciences, in order to reduce the scientific and technological gap in access to and use of HPC technologies.

The PRACE-Italy infrastructure is hosted in Casalecchio di Reno (Bologna), at CINECA and consists of the Galileo 100 Tier1 HPC node. Galileo 100 offers both cloud and HPC services and it is connected to the GARR network. The service includes high-end GPUs (Nvidia V100) for big-data and machine learning applications. More technical details can be found at https://www.hpc.cineca.it/systems/hardware/galileo100/. Thanks to the PNRR TeRABIT project, the Tier1 system will be upgraded during 2025.