Enea's Cresco8 supercomputer in the top 500 most powerful in the world

Enea's supercomputer at the Portici research centre in the top 500 most powerful in the world. It is the Cresco8 supercomputer with a computing power that, as Enea emphasises, 'will make it possible to accelerate and strengthen research, development and innovation activities in many fields. It already supports research in the fields of nuclear fusion, climate change, artificial intelligence applied to new energy technologies, and new materials. "In particular,' say Enea, 'its use will be decisive in the realisation of the Divertor Tokamak Test Facility, the experimental fusion plant under construction at the ENEA Research Centre in Frascati'.CRESCO8 is a new Lenovo High Performance Computing system, built in collaboration with Intel. Its distinguishing features include very low energy consumption thanks to its water cooling technology, which can dissipate up to 98 per cent of the heat produced by the supercomputer and save 40 per cent of energy.

An important step but not a new one for the research agency. "ENEA has been equipped since the 1960s with powerful calculation tools to support its research and development activities,' says Director General Giorgio Graditi. In the beginning, it was mainly concerned with studies in the field of nuclear energy, but with time and the expansion of our mission, our interest has also extended to energy in a broader sense and to climate'. Not only that, the director emphasises ENEA's pioneering vision in the scientific field "by creating its own computational infrastructure that makes advanced calculation systems and scientific data management available to the scientific community and industry". "And this is how,' he adds, 'the first structured datacenter for parallel computing CRESCO was born'. Financed with Next Generation EU funds, Cresco8 is the latest evolution of the CRESCO family of supercomputers, which has been providing high-performance computing to ENEA and its scientific and industrial partners for over fifteen years.

"CRESCO8 is ranked in the first half of the TOP500 at 228th position, an achievement that places ENEA in a prestigious sphere in the panorama of the world's computing resources," emphasises Giovanni Ponti, head of ENEA's ICT Division. "Even more significant is the positioning of CRESCO8 at 134th position in the Green TOP500, the ranking that measures supercomputer performance in relation to energy efficiency. Along with Cresco8, Cineca's Pitagora-Cpu, installed in Casalecchio di Reno (Bologna), and the European Space Agency's SpaceHPC, in Frascati, have also entered the TOP 500 ranking.