With Lenovo's new HPC system, the research center will be able to not only enhance and accelerate research activities, but also improve its operational efficiency by optimizing energy use to help achieve its rigorous sustainability goals.

Milan, May 9, 2024 – The Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC) in Lecce renews its collaboration with Lenovo for the installation of a powerful new HPC (High Performance Computing) system that will support climate change research by providing increased processing capabilities and optimizing energy use for the operation of the high-capacity computing infrastructure.

"Cassandra", Lenovo's new HPC system that will be installed in Lecce, is composed of 180 SD650 V3 nodes with two Intel Xeon Max 9480 CPUs (Sapphire Rapids HBM) and can reach a processing power of 1.2 PetaFlops[1] peak, with a 100% increase compared to the solution currently in operation at CMCC.

Cassandra also ensures better energy efficiency, allowing electricity consumption for system cooling to be kept 15% lower than similar air-cooled solutions, with the use of Lenovo Neptune Direct Water-Cooling technology that is able to capture up to 98% of the heat produced by the supercomputer. Liquidcooling saves the energy used for the fans, and thanks to the increased efficiency, the temperature of the CPUs does not reach critical values, avoiding the reduction of the maximum frequency of the cores.

In addition, CMCC plans to integrate the system with a dedicated AI workload solution based on 2 nodes with 8 Nvidia H100 GPUs each. The installation of this system is planned for the second half of the year.

HPC to solve the challenges of climate change

Founded in 2005 with the financial support of the then MIUR, the Ministry of the Environment, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and the Ministry of Finance, the CMCC was born with the specific aim of carrying out studies and models of the climate system, ensuring reliable, timely and rigorous results useful for designing sustainable growth, protecting the environment and developing adaptation and mitigation policies based on knowledge Scientific.

Today, the CMCC is a global reference point for the integrated study of climate-related issues and is one of the few facilities in Europe dedicated exclusively to research on climate change and its interactions with society and economic systems. HPC systems are valuable tools for CMCC scientists, who have the task of processing, thanks to supercomputers, the data collected in the field to predict how the climate will change and what effects these changes will have on the planet and human activities.

On the new Cassandra supercomputer, climate simulation models of the earth system, the ocean, both global and regional seasonal forecasting systems, AI-based climate change applications will be executed.

A strong partnership

Lenovo's new supercomputer will be installed in 2024 at the CMCC Supercomputing Center (SCC), which has been active since 2008 and is currently the largest computing facility in Italy entirely dedicated to the study of climate change, as well as one of the most advanced in Europe. The Supercomputing Center already hosts an HPC system from Lenovo: "Juno, installed in 2022, which has a total computing power of approximately 1,134 TFlops and is based on Intel processors and NVIDIA GPUs.

"We are delighted with this renewed collaboration with CMCC, which today is a center of excellence in Europe for research on climate change, a crucial topic for our time and for future generations," said Alessandro de Bartolo, CEO and Country General Manager Infrastructure Solutions Group at Lenovo. "High-performance computing is a valuable tool to address the challenge of complexity in research institutes, laboratories but also in the enterprise because it makes calculations, analyses and simulations that were previously time-consuming and expensive accessible. Lenovo is the world's leading supplier of supercomputers and at the same time took the top spot in the Green500, the ranking that measures the energy efficiency of HPC systems. Our ambition is to constantly elevate the performance of supercomputers by ensuring that our HPC systems maintain sustainable energy consumption levels."

"Over the years, since the first installation of HPC systems at SCC, Lenovo has proven to be a very reliable technological partner by offering cutting-edge solutions, which have allowed CMCC researchers to obtain important results in climate simulations," notes Prof. Giovanni Aloisio, Director of the CMCC Supercomputing Center.

The new supercomputer will be installed by Ricca IT, a Lenovo certified business partner, which over the years has gained significant experience in the HPC and AI fields, among the most recognized companies on the Italian scene.

[1] A petaflop equals a thousand trillion calculations per second (a trillion is a million per third), where "peta" stands for 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.