Cineca, established in 1969, is a non-profit consortium of 69 Italian Universities, the National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics (OGS), the National Research Council (CNR), and the Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR). Cineca is the largest Italian supercomputing centre with an HPC environment equipped with cutting-edge technology and highly-qualified personnel which cooperates with researchers in the use of the HPC infrastructure, in both the academic and industrial fields. Cineca’s mission is to enable the Italian and European research community to accelerate the scientific discovery using HPC resources in a profitable way, exploiting the newest technological advances in HPC, data management, storage systems, tools, services and expertise at large.

On mandate of the MIUR Ministry, Cineca represents Italy in PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (www.prace-ri.eu), a persistent pan-European Research Infrastructure (RI) providing leading HPC resources to enable world-class science and engineering for academia and industry in Europe. Cineca is one of the four PRACE Tier-0 Hosting Centres.Since June 2014, Sanzio Bassini, director of Supercomputing, Application and Innovation Department (SCAI) in Cineca, is the chair of the PRACE Council.

Cineca is one of the founding members of the European Technology Platform for HPC (ETP4HPC), an industry led forum providing a framework for stakeholders, to define research priorities and action plans on a number of technological areas where achieving EU growth, competitiveness and sustainability requires major research and technological advances in the medium to long term period. Moreover Cineca SCAI is the Italian representative in the pan-European EUDAT Collaborative Data e-Infrastructure and core partner in Human Brain Project, the EU flagship project facing the big challenge of understanding the human brain.

Besides the national scientific HPC facility Cineca manages and exploits the supercomputing facility of the Italian energy company (ENI), an integrated HPC facility with more than 60.000 cores.

The SCAI Department in Cineca has a long experience in cooperating with the researchers in parallelising, enabling and scaling-up their applications in different computational disciplines, covering condensed matter physics, astrophysics, geophysics, chemistry, earth sciences, engineering, CFD, mathematics, life sciences and bioinformatics, but also “non-traditional” ones, such as biomedicine, archaeology and data-analytics. Cineca has strong relationship with its own stakeholders and collaborates with the scientific communities to enable and develop new applications and tools to better address the challenges of the High-end HPC systems. Cineca has a wide experience in providing education and training in the different fields of parallel computing and computational sciences and is one of the six PRACE Advanced Training Centres (PATCs).

Contribution to OPRECOMP

The key contribution of CINECA to the OPRECOMP project will be the development of micro benchmarks and mini-apps based on real applications of the three selected workloads:

  • Big Data,
  • Deep Learning,
  • Floating point intensive HPC applications.

In addition, CINECA will contribute to the porting of a full application and select an appropriate test case to validate the transprecision algorithms and HW. Most of these contributions go in the WP7.

Besides WP7, CINECA will also contribute to the algorithm development and validation carried out in WP6, and to the system software configuration and testing in WP5.

Finally, CINECA will contribute to the dissemination activities of WP9.

Team

The key contribution of CINECA to the OPRECOMP project will be the development of micro benchmarks and mini-apps based on real applications of the three selected workload: Big Data, Deep Learning, and floating point intensive HPC applications. In addition, CINECA will contribute to the porting of a full application and select an appropriate test case to validate the transprecision algorithms and HW. Most of these contributions go in the WP7. Besides WP7, CINECA will also contribute to the algorithm development and validation carried out in WP6, and to the system software configuration and testing in WP5. Finally, CINECA will contribute to the dissemination activities of WP9.

Dr. Carlo Cavazzoni

Responsible of HPC user support and R&D activities

He has been graduated in physics at the University of Modena in the 1994, and subsequently he has attained the degree of Phd at the International School for Advanced Studies (ISAS-SISSA) of Trieste in 1998 with a thesis about: “Large Scale First-Principles Simulations of Water and Ammonia at High Pressure and Temperature”. During his PhD, he has studied various problems concerning the implementation and the efficiency of parallel numerical algorithms being used in physical computer simulations. He collaborate with different user communities to enable applications on massively parallel systems and innovative architecture solutions. In particular he is responsible for the parallel design of Quantum ESPRESSO suite of codes. He is a steering board member of the European Technology Platform for HPC (ETP4HPC). Co-PI and WP leader in the MaX CoE. PI of the CINECA Intel Parallel Computing Centre. He his author and co-author of 50+ peer review articles,including Science, Physical Review Letters, Nature Materials, and many others. More than 5 PhD sponsored by Cineca, about 5 bachelor, more than 10 stages, more than 5 intern-ship, and 1 master project supervised.

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Dr. Andrew Emerson

Andrew Emerson graduated in Chemistry from the University of Southampton (UK) in 1987. He stayed in Southampton to study for a doctorate in Computational Chemistry, awarded in 1991. After many years in research in the UK and Italy in the field of Molecular Dynamics, he joined the Cineca supercomputer centre located in Bologna, Italy in 2000 as an applications specialist. He currently works at Cineca in a number of European projects and gives courses on computational chemistry and parallel computing. In 1997 he was awarded the title “Young Scientist of the Year” by the British Liquid Crystal society. He is married with one child and lives in Bologna.

For the OPRECOMP project, he’s involve in the development and porting of the application microbenchmarks.

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Dr. Giorgio Pedrazzi

Dr. Giorgio Pedrazzi has received his PhD in Statistical Methodology for Scientific Research from the University of Bologna. His current role in the Cineca’s SCAI department is in the Big Data Analytics team. His interests include: Data and Multimedia Mining, Machine Learning and Information Extraction. Currently is involved in the development of Machine Learning applications for CINECA customers. He collaborated to Cineca Data Mining projects developed for the Italian Regulatory Authority for Electricity and Gas and Italian Revenue Agency. He developed Text Mining applications for the Italian Research National Portal and, inside the ASTREA National funded research project, he contributed to develop Information Extraction techniques for the monitoring of the Italian judicial system through the analysis of Court decisions. He was involved in the European project Papyrus: Cultural and historical digital libraries dynamically mined from news archives.

For the OPRECOMP project, He’s involved in the development of micro benchmarks and mini-apps based on real applications of the three selected workloads: Big Data, Deep Learning and floating point intensive HPC applications.

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Frederico Ficarelli

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