High Performance Computing Center (HPCC)
Since 2008, the High Performance Computing Center is the most powerful computational facility in Italy and among the most advanced in Europe, fully dedicated to Climate Change research.
In 2022 the High Performance Computing Center changed its location at the new CMCC headquarters in Lecce. This also includes the upgrading of the computing and storage facilities.
32,400
cores
2,359
TFlops
Theoretical peak performance (1TFlop = 1,000 billion operations per second)
37 PetaBytes
over
Storage system capacity
62 PetaBytes
Tape Library (archiving system)
The High Performance Computing Center is composed of two interacting HPC facilities.
ZEUS is based on 348 Lenovo SD530 biprocessor nodes (for a total of 12,528 cores) all interconnected by means of an Infiniband EDR network. The HPC system has a computing power (theoretical peak performance) of 1,202 TFlops.
JUNO, the new supercomputer installed in the new CMCC headquarters in Lecce during 2022, has a computing power (theoretical peak performance) of about 1,134 TFlops and is based on the new Intel processors generation (3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable codenamed “Ice Lake”) and also on the latest generation of NVIDIA GPU (NVIDIA Ampere architecture).
This new project includes the upgrading of the computing and storage facilities through the European funds dedicated to the Regional Operational Programme 2014 – 2020 (Apulia region).
The technical details of both the supercomputers Zeus and Juno are summarized in Table below.
| CMCC HPC facilities – Systems overview | ||
| ZEUS supercomputer | JUNO supercomputer | |
| Compute node type | Lenovo SD530 | Lenovo SD630 v2 |
| Processor type | Intel Xeon Gold 6154 (18 cores) | Intel Xeon Platinum 8360Y (36 cores) |
| Processor Speed | 3.0 GHz | 2.4 GHz |
| # of processor cores | 12,528 | 12,240 |
| GPU type | —- | NVIDIA A100 |
| # GPU | 0 | 20 |
| # of nodes | 348 (dual processors nodes) | 170 (dual processors nodes) |
| Memory per node | 96 GB | 512 GB |
| Interconnection | Infiniband EDR (100Gbps) | Infiniband HDR (200Gbps) |
| Peak Performance | 1,202 TFlops | 1,134 TFlops |
| Operating System | Linux CentOS 7.6 x86_64 | Linux x86_64 (Red Hat or Suse) |
| Batch Queueing System | IBM Spectrum LSF v. 10.2.0.9 (HPC Suite) | IBM Spectrum LSF v. 10.x (HPC Suite) |
| Cluster Parallel File System | IBM Spectrum Scale v.5.0.3 (GPFS) | IBM Spectrum Scale v.5.x (GPFS) |
| File systems | /users_home 100TB
/work 4 PB of usable capacity /data 4 PB of usable capacity |
/users_home 100TB
/work 11,3 PB of usable capacity /data 11,7 PB of usable capacity |
The CMCC long term archiving system
In order to manage and preserve for medium/long term the huge quantity of climate data produced by the research and operational activities at CMCC, in 2019 a new archiving system has been deployed.
The hardware components of this new system are:
- IBM TS4500 tape library with nr 6 LTO8 drives and 2 accessors, 5PBytes of capacity
- Nr 2 servers Lenovo ThinkSystem SR630
- Nr 1 IBM DS2200 FC storage system
- 16Gbps FC SAN implemented with nr 2 Lenovo FC switches B6505
IBM Spectrum Archive Enterprise Edition is the software that manages the tape library operations and stores the data on the tape tier in the Linear Tape File System (LTFS) format.
In 2022, the CMCC archiving system moved to the new CMCC data center and has been upgraded in order to extend both its capacity (to 40 PetaBytes) and its I/O throughput by adding 8 more LTO8 drives.
The CMCC High Performance Computing Center
