The Portici (Naples) headquarters of the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development ( ENEA) will acquire a new supercomputer, CRESCO7, to heat rooms and sanitary water during the winter and summer periods.
In a recent interview, Giovanni Ponti, head of the ENEA Division for the Development of information Technology and ICT Systems, has highlighted that CRESCO7, along with CRESCO6 – inaugurated in 2018 – will have the capability of performing approximately half a million billion mathematical operations every second.
The most important features of CRESCO7 include the strong attention to environmental sustainability and the recovery of heat generated by the supercomputing systems: “CRESCO7 will be available to institutions, research organizations, universities and high-tech companies in a number of sectors, including climate change study, air pollution forecasts and the development of new materials for the production of renewable energy.”
The new features characterizing the ENEA project are: a new operating system, a new submission job queue manager and a new type of parallel file system. These factors confirm the positioning of ENEA CRESCO supercomputers among the major public computing resources in Italy.
“All these features make the basic software stack completely open source for the first time in one of the CRESCO supercomputers and will be the starting point for future large-scale systems, such as the upcoming CRESCO8 computing system (about 10 PetaFLOPS) , whose launch is scheduled for autumn 2024 in Portici”, explained Francesco Iannone, head of the ENEA the Infrastructure for scientific and high-performance computing lab.
