ENEA Chooses Lenovo for Supercomputer to Accelerate Sustainable Energy Research

 ENEA, the National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development, has selected Lenovo for the installation of an HPC system at the Portici (Naples) hub to accelerate research activities on clean energy, in particular on nuclear fusion. This new HPC system, consisting of 758 nodes with 2 Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8592+ CPUs, will allow to bring the computational capabilities of CRESCO – Computational Center for Research on Complex Systems – the supercomputing system hosted in the Portici Research Center, from the current 1.01 to over 6.5 Petaflops[1], placing it at the top of the national scene in terms of processing power.

In addition to the computational power needed to accelerate research activities, sustainability for ENEA was also one of the crucial factors behind the choice of the partner for the project and Lenovo’s HPC solution guarantees better energy efficiency than in the past. The use of Lenovo Neptune Direct Water-Cooling technology, in fact, is able to capture up to 98% of the heat produced by the supercomputer and liquid cooling saves the energy used for the fans. Thanks to the greater efficiency, the temperature of the CPUs does not reach critical values, avoiding the reduction of the maximum frequency of the cores. In addition, the Lenovo hardware used for the installation was entirely made in Lenovo’s manufacturing facility in Hungary, designed in the heart of Europe with cutting-edge technologies also from an energy point of view, allowing a reduction in emissions for the transport of the necessary computing infrastructure.

ENEA develops and manages a complex ICT architecture that provides users with advanced systems for calculation, modeling and three-dimensional data visualization, through extensive use of GRID technologies. The ICT infrastructure currently includes 6 poles (Frascati, Portici, Bologna, Casaccia, Trisaia, Brindisi), each equipped with 3D computing and visualization infrastructures and specialized skills operating on different application topics. In particular, the CRESCO computing centers are able to provide advanced computational services to all ENEA users and its public and private partners in all the application areas in which the Institute is active: energy applications (combustion, fluid dynamics), nuclear and fusion codes, climatological and environmental models, structure of matter, modeling for networks and critical infrastructures, remote control of large instruments, bioinformatics. In the energy sector, forecasting and generative activities can help identify solutions that can improve the efficiency of some processes related to digitization and decarbonization both in the public and private sectors and in the industrial sector.

“Today, high-performance computing and artificial intelligence open new horizons in crucial areas for our society such as sustainable economic development, climate, innovation in the energy sector and medicine, research areas that see ENEA at the forefront.” – comments Alessandro de Bartolo, Country General Manager Infrastructure Solutions Group at Lenovo in Italy. “That’s why Lenovo is proud to support a center of excellence like ENEA in these global challenges with our technologies, our experience and our ability to innovate.”

“The new supercomputer CRESCO8 represents an important technological advance for ENEA, increasing computing resources with cutting-edge systems from the point of view of parallel computing, which at the same time guarantee high levels of energy efficiency”, notes Giovanni Ponti, Head of ENEA’s ICT Division of the Department of Energy Technologies and Renewable Sources “CRESCO8 will allow ENEA researchers and all its research partners to be able to perform numerical codes, computational models, simulations and artificial intelligence algorithms in a next-generation high-performance parallel computing cluster, capable of responding to the new needs of the scientific community and research projects”.

The installation is handled by Ricca IT, a Lenovo certified business partner. Over the years, Ricca IT has gained significant experience in the HPC and AI field, making it one of the most recognized entities in the Italian landscape.

[1] A petaflop is equivalent to a thousand trillion calculations per second (a trillion is a million to the third), where “peta” indicates the value of 10 to 15 (10^15) while “flop” stands for floating point operations per second, i.e. the number of floating point operations performed in one second.