Supercomputer, Enea turns on Cresco8: it will help nuclear fusion research

"To see Iter in operation is estimated to take 15 years. This supercomputer has the task of trying to bring closer the moment when nuclear fusion will become an energy source," explained Alessandro Dodaro, who at ENEA is director of the Nuc department and scientific head of the Dtt-U project. In the meantime, Cresco8 "will also be used for nuclear fission research: we are working to turn on a first reactor in Canada by 2029," added Dodaro.

CRESCO8 will be included in the upcoming TOP500 ranking of the world's fastest supercomputers, which will be made official at the ISC conference in Hamburg next June. This ranking sees our country well represented: with 14 supercomputers, Italy is first in Europe for installed supercomputing power and third in the world after the United States and Japan.

Cresco8 will also be used in other strategic areas, such as climate change, the development of new materials, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. On the new materials front, it will accelerate the identification and optimisation of the most innovative materials for the energy sector, helping to identify optimal solutions for photovoltaics, batteries and energy devices. And again: high simulation calculations and simulations on climate change, air quality, air pollution.

"Increasing computing power and reducing energy consumption is a crucial and complex challenge for our industry. The new infrastructure brings together power and technologies to tackle extremely articulated workloads ranging from advanced numerical simulations to the processing of big data and artificial intelligence," comments Giovanni Ponti, head of ENEA's IT and ICT Systems Development Division of the Energy Technologies and Renewable Sources Department.

"From a computing capacity point of view," he adds, "CRESCO8 with over 9 PFlops of computational power represents a significant improvement over the previous system consisting of CRESCO6 and CRESCO7, which reached 2 PFlops.

From a technological point of view, CRESCO8 is a Lenovo ThinkSystem SD650 V3 Neptune system composed of 758 nodes with 2 Intel Xeon Platinum 8592 CPUs that guarantee a high computational capacity and better energy efficiency than before, thanks to water cooling Lenovo Neptune technology that captures up to 95% of the heat produced by the supercomputer.

"The market - explains Alessandro de Bartolo, managing director & country manager Infrastructure solutions group of Lenovo Italy - recognises our ability to design high-performance supercomputing architectures starting from standard elements. This is the consequence of a little known fact: Lenovo has an internal division totally dedicated to the development of solutions for large data centres. This has allowed us to design and build this innovative cooling system: a liquid circuit capable of dissipating over 95 per cent of the heat, using water and not electricity, as air cooling systems based on fans do".

A result that will soon be further improved. "The new generation of the system, which is called ThinkSystem sc750 V4 Neptune," adds de Bartolo, "is able to dissipate 98 per cent of the heat. All this with up to 40 per cent lower energy consumption compared to traditional cooling systems'.

Fifth instalment of the investigation 'Supercomputing & AI: stories of humans, machines and artificial intelligences processing the future'. The other episodes were released on 15 February, the 24 February, the 2 March, the 17 March, the 15 April, the 27 April and the 11 May.