CINECA - Consorzio Interuniversitario

CINECA (Interuniversity Consortium established by law in 1969) is a private body. Its institutional mission is to support research conducted by the Italian scientific community through supercomputing and its applications. CINECA is a Consortium of 37 Italian Universities, the CNR - National Research Council, the OGS- National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics and the MIUR - Ministry of University and Research. The present supercomputing facility is based on integrated infrastructure of more than 15.000 processors. The state of the art HPC system is an IBM Power 6 supercomputer with 168 nodes, each with 32 cores and 128 GB of RAM memory. The interconnection network is based on DDR Infiniband technology and the storage accounts for 1.8 Petabytes of storage. The aggregate peak power is 100 Teraflops. Besides that, CINECA runs a IBM Blue Gene P with 1024 CPU quad core and a power of 14 Teraflops. The data centre of CINECA is equipped to provide business continuity technology. Besides the national scientific supercomputing facility CINECA manages and exploits the supercomputing facility of ENI, the Italian Energy company, which is an integrated facility of up to 10.000 processors. CINECA has a long experience in HPC code parallelisation and optimisation and in providing education and training in the different fields of parallel computing and computational sciences.

CINECA plays an active role in various national and EC-funded R&D and infrastructure projects on different aspects of HPC and Grid computing. CINECA is member of the DEISA2 Execomm in DEISA and coordinates HPC-Europa2 and HPCWorld.

As the MIUR is one of the consortium members of CINECA, the Italian Ministry of University and Research has a direct role in supporting this proposal. This role is also confirmed by the nomination given to CINECA to represent Italy in PRACE.

CINECA will contribute to all the coordination, service and RTD work packages, in particular to WP4 as leader, to WP2 in the tasks concerning the RI organizational evolution, to WP3 in the training task, to WP6 focusing in the tasks concerning the deployment of services and new technologies, to WP7 in the petascale application enabling and programming techniques, to WP8 in the design and operation and best practices task, to WP9 in the technology watch task and exascale software.