The Bologna supercomputer will bring Europe into the quantum age
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The goal is still to be reached, but it is only a matter of time: one of the first European quantum systems will be installed in Italy, and most probably its location will be the technopole of Cineca di Bologna, the Italian inter-university consortium for automatic calculation (to which about seventy universities and a dozen research institutions participate) where the Leonardo supercomputer is ready to operate.
The fact that our country has been chosen, together with five others, by the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), the body responsible for promoting and developing high-performance computing in the Old Continent, is important for at least two reasons. The first: Italian technology will be part of a project that will lead quantum computers to integrate into existing infrastructures to act as accelerators of new applications in the field of scientific and industrial research, health and meteorology. The second: Italian researchers in the public and private sector will have one more tool at their disposal to conduct experiments and create skills that will influence the innovation process of the entire system.
The new quantum machine will increase Leonardo’s current processing capacity of 250 trillion (million billion) operations per second, capacities that elevate the “big brain” assembled by Atos at Cineca to the top positions of the world Top500 supercomputer ranking . Costing around 240 million euros and co-financed by EuroHPC JU and the Ministry of Education, Leonardo will guarantee a computational power ten times higher than the current top-of-the-range system, Marconi 100.
For the Bologna technopole, and for Italian High Performance Computing in general, this is an important evolutionary step to establish itself among the most contributing European nations in terms of data processing capacity, given the key role attributed to HPC solutions for the development of a digital sovereignty considered indispensable for the security and operational autonomy of government bodies and companies.
The collaborations that Cineca has in place with the National Institute of Nuclear Physics and the Cmcc foundation (Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change), the birth at the technopole of the new National Supercomputing Center (financed with Next Generation Eu funds) and the The five-year partnership that Atos has established with the University of Bologna for training and technology transfer projects in the HPC and quantum computing fields are some examples of an effort that goes in the direction of creating a cutting-edge ecosystem on a global scale. In this sense, the probable presence of Ursula Von Der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, at the ignition of Leonardo, scheduled for November 24, is symbolic.
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