(updated: Jan 18 )
CINECA is one of the Large Scale Facilities in Europe. Its hardware resources are the most powerful available in Italy and among the most powerful available in the world.
The HPC environment in CINECA is made of general purpose computers constantly maintained at the technological leading edge. They are integrated in a common working environment in order to make it simpler for the users the access, the everyday working and the portability of data and applications among different platforms.
At present the main HPC system (Tier-0 level) is MARCONI, a LENOVO system composed by three different partitions: Intel Broadwell (712 nodes); Intel KnigthsLanding (3600 nodes): Intel Skylake (2304 nodes). The set-up of Marconi was completed in three different phases from June 2016 to January 2018. The final performance of Marconi is around 20 PFlops peak.
Along with MARCONI, a Tier-1 level system, the old GALILEO has been renewed in March 2018 with Intel Xeon E5-2697 v4 (Broadwell) nodes.
Last but not least, a system prototype, acquired within the PRACE project, named D.A.V.I.D.E., based on OpenPower and NVidia technology, will be available to users in the first part of 2018.
All the systems share a large storage infrastructure for medium-long term archive (about 20 PB of disk storage and 20 PB on magnetic support).
- If you are a researcher from the Academia or other non-profit Institutions, you can obtain a username/passw on our HPC systems by applying to special resource allocation programmes. You can use our systems for running applications from our Software Catalog or even your own code. Several tools for programmers are available such as compilers, profiling tools and debuggers. Our HPC systems can be reached through ssh or through specific portals for remote visualization or data movement applications.
- If you are a researcher from a private company, you can use our HPC systems for special HPC industrial projects developed in collaboration with our specialists. These systems are equipped with top level programming environments and the application tools required for the project.
For more details about the hardware resources available in CINECA, refer to out "Resource" page.
This guide is (mainly) about the use of the "HPC Scientific" class of computers, in particular: MARCONI, GALILEO and D.A.V.I.D.E.. It is organised as follows:
1. General information: the description of the HPC environment architecture, documentation about tools and procedures that are similar on all systems;
2. System specific guides: a chapter for each system, describing specific tools and procedures.
Outgoing links: