@CINECA

Visit CINECA!

Who we are

CINECA is a non profit Consortium, made up of 69 Italian universities, 21 Italian National Institutions, and the Italian Ministry of Education. Today it is the largest Italian computing centre, one of the most important worldwide. With more than seven hundred employees, it operates in the technological transfer sector through high performance scientific computing, the management and development of networks and web based services, and the development of complex information systems for treating large amounts of data.

The mission of the HPC department is to accelerate the scientific discovery by providing high performance computing resources, data management and storage systems and tools and HPC services and expertise at large, aiming to develop and promote technical and scientific services related to high-performance computing for the Italian and European research community.

Cineca is currently one of the Large Scale Facilities in Europe and it is a PRACE Tier-0 hosting site.

  • MARCONI: It is the Tier-0 system that replaced FERMI in July 2016. It is based on the LENOVO NeXtScale platform and the next generation of the Intel Xeon Phi product family. It has been gradually upgraded from June 2016. The actual configuration consists of Marconi-A3 with SkyLake (in production since August 2017, upgraded in January 2018 and completed in November 2018). In a previous configuration phase, Marconi had two additional partitions: Marconi-A1 with Intel Broadwell, into production since July 2016, closed in September 2018, and Marconi-A2 with Intel KnightsLanding into production since January 2017, closed in January 2020. Marconi is classified in Top500 list among the most powerful supercomputer:  rank 12 in November 2016, and rank 19 in the November 2018 list.
  • MARCONI100:  It is the new accelerated not conventional Marconi partition available from April 2020. This is an IBM system equipped with NVIDIA Volta V100GPUs, opening the way to the accelerated pre-exascale Leonardo supercomputer. 
  • GALILEO: It has been renewed in March 2018 with Intel Xeon E5-2697 v4 (Broadwell) nodes, available for the Italian research community.
  • CLOUD.HPC: CINECA cloud service has been renewed in April 2020 with Intel E5-2697 v4 (Broadwell) nodes, completing the HPC ecosystem. 

cineca

CINECA enables world-class scientific research by operating and supporting leading-edge supercomputing technologies and by managing a state-of-the-art and effective environment for the different scientific communities. The staff offers support and consultancy in HPC tools and techniques and in several scientific domains, such as physics, particle physics, material sciences, chemistry.  Cineca is currently:

  • a CUDA Research Center, based on the vision, quality, and impact of its research leveraging GPU technology;
  • an Intel® Parallel Computing Center, to accelerate the creation of open standard, portable and scalable parallel applications by combining computational science, hardware, programmer tools, compilers and libraries, with domain knowledge and expertise. Specific focus of Cineca in this action is Quantum Espresso and SPECFEM3D;
  • one of the PRACE PATCs (PRACE Advanced Training Centres), to carry out and coordinate training and education activities that enable the European research community to utilise the computational infrastructure available through PRACE.

HPC-Europa experience at CINECA

CINECA was an active partner of all previous HPC-Europa runs. CINECA has demonstrated its attractiveness for the European researchers in the previous HPC-Europa2 project and also as one of the PRACE Advanced Training Centres (PATC). Within the framework of the current HPC-Europa3 consortium, we again offer the unique opportunity for all European researchers to get the experience of working with Italian research groups while CINECA provides them with computational recourses and other high-quality ICT services. In its turn, the Italian researchers can apply for a visitor program (Transnational Access, TA) to any of 8 HPC-Europa3 partners’ centres in Europe.

Over its four-year lifespan (2017-2021), we plan to host about 180 visitors in Italy. 

CINECA offers to visitors

  • access to one of the most advanced high performance computing facilities in Europe
  • collaboration with scientific hosts in Italy (outside CINECA) in a huge variety of research fields
  • technical and scientific support from our internal researchers with large expertise
  • travel and living expenses
  • logistical support before and during your stay

Some pre-visit arrangements

Once you have been contacted, as soon as possible before starting your visit, you are requested to send us your name, surname, address, date and place of born, a copy of your passport or identity card, and an electronic picture of yourself. 

You will receive well in advance a file containing information about reimbursements and living expenses grant.

During your stay

CINECA is located in Casalecchio di Reno, a small town near Bologna. The Bologna airport is not far from here (10 minutes by taxi). From CINECA you can easily reach downtown Bologna by bus (see the bus transports timetables) and by train (very useful -10 minutes) from the stop called Ceretolo to the main Bologna railway station. The train is called Suburbana and with a common bus ticket you can reach Bologna. Look for the timetable.

Useful links

Contact us

In general questions please contact the European coordinators of HPC-Europa3 Transnational Access Programme at staff (at) hpc-europa.org.

For questions and other topics related to visiting Italy under HPC-Europa3 please contact:

HPC-Europa3 Project Manager, CINECA
Debora Testi
d.testi (at) cineca.it