E4 Computer Engineering, a leading Italian company in the sector of hardware and software solutions with very high technological content, has won the tender for the upgrading of Galileo 100, the supercomputer of the CINECA Interuniversity Consortium and Tier-1 cloud system for public scientific research capable of serving more than 5000 users.
Among the most important requirements of the new infrastructure, CINECA had indicated the ability to increase the number of vCPUs available for VM services by at least 10 times, to balance the increase in the number of vCPUs with adequate storage, and a multi-protocol storage (files, blocks, objects) for long-term data retention and interactive processing.
“The Galileo 100 upgrade project will bring a notable advancement and significant diversification of the computational resources made available to Italian and European researchers”, claims Sanzio Bassini, director of the Supercomputing Department of the CINECA inter-university consortium. “The project involves a significant renewal of the computing infrastructure that provides virtualization, analysis and data visualization services with the aim of providing users with a new cloud infrastructure for research – on a national and European scale – with resources available computational and the necessary flexibility to allow the effective creation of platforms dedicated to frontier scientific projects, in the fields of AI, Digital Twin, weather-climate, Industry 4.0, and all the main computational sciences”.
Fundamental requirements in the project guidelines were, in fact, also the potential linked to the economy of scale in the provision of high-end IT infrastructures dedicated to international research projects.
Faced with these requests, E4 engineers studied a solution based on OpenStack and identified Dell as the ideal partner for the supply of hardware components capable of satisfying the tender requirements.
Dell, a global player in the HPC sector and provider of solutions with proven performance and robustness, knows Galileo 100 well, having designed and engineered the current system.
At the heart of the winning project are the Dell PowerEdge HS7710 solutions for the CPU nodes and the Dell PowerEdge R760xa for the GPU nodes, the latter equipped with Nvidia L40s and Nvidia A30 PCIe GPUs.
“As a historic partner of CINECA, to which we are linked by a common vision and a shared commitment to putting the best that technology has to offer today at the service of the Italian research community, we faced this competition with the certainty of proposing a winning solution, strong of our experience and ability to imagine and create solutions of the highest technological level”, commented Cosimo Damiano Gianfreda, CEO of E4 Computer Engineering. “To create the best solution we wanted rleading companies in their respective sectors such as Dell and VAST Data, together with which we have created a collaboration and co-design process which resulted in a proposal that CINECA selected, capable of combining performance, scalability and modularity, going beyond the requirements of the tender itself. My most sincere thanks go to them and naturally to the entire E4 team for this very important result”.
During the definition phase of the proposal, E4 and Dell were joined by VAST Data, a dynamic company that offers a high-performance AI platform dedicated to data management.
“We are proud to have the opportunity to support CINECA in its mission to support research and innovation projects in Italy and Europe in the field of computational sciences,” declared Roberto Dognini, Regional Sales Director for Italy at VAST Data. “As one of the key pillars of the Galileo 100 project, the VAST Data Platform will allow CINECA to create, manage and protect a 50 petabyte multi-protocol datalake connected to different computing infrastructures and the European supercomputer Leonardo. Together with the great professionals and talents of E4 we are allowing CINECA to further advance by offering performance, competitiveness and Artificial Intelligence services to the country.”
The new solution, designed in collaboration with Dell and E4, represents the umpteenth stage of the technological path that has seen E4 alongside CINECA for years in developing technological infrastructures of the highest level in the field of supercomputing that operate at the service of the development of applications and projects of frontier research, to support scientific innovation in Italy, Europe and globally.
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