On the one hand, there is a need for ever-increasing computing power to facilitate research, particularly in the field of clean energy production. On the other hand, there is a need to reduce consumption in order to avoid continuing to pollute and damage the planet. The development of supercomputers dedicated to artificial intelligence, which is used in science even more than GenAI, is a complex challenge for manufacturers and research centres.
To better understand the issue, I visited the Enea Research Centre, the National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development, in Portici, near Naples, to take a closer look at Cresco8. Housed in a 150-square-metre area designed to optimise efficiency, the new Enea-Lenovo supercomputer has computational capabilities to support research and development in strategic sectors such as fusion energy, climate change, artificial intelligence and new materials.
A giant leap forward
Among the many activities it will support, Cresco8 will enable the development of advanced models and simulations to study the behaviour of plasma used in nuclear fusion reactions. This requires a computing capacity of over 9 petaflops, equivalent to nine thousand trillion calculations per second. This power makes it the largest supercomputer installed in southern Italy, also because it far exceeds the power of its predecessors, Cresco6 and Cresco7, which are capable of reaching 2 petaflops.
The innovative and significant feature of Cresco8 in terms of energy consumption reduction is its energy efficiency, thanks to Lenovo Neptune water cooling technology. This allows up to 98% of the heat produced by the supercomputer to be captured, reducing the amount of energy used to cool the system by up to 40%. On a technical level, the supercomputer is a Lenovo ThinkSystem SD650 Neptune system with 758 nodes and two Intel Xeon Platinum 8592 CPUs, a combination that allows the supercomputer to enter the TOP500 ranking of the world’s largest and fastest computers.
A supercomputer to help everyone grow
The significance of having such a powerful machine goes beyond Enea’s activities, as Cresco8 can be used by universities, research institutions, companies and start-ups active in developing solutions that require High Performance Computing. Seeing the size of the supercomputer with my own eyes was impressive because I had never seen one before. Going down two floors below ground level and finding myself in front of the server cluster was useful in getting an idea of the supercomputer’s capacity and the impact it will have on the activities of Enea and other players who will be able to take advantage of Cresco8’s power.
In this sense, the words of Giovanni Ponti, Head of ENEA’s IT and ICT Systems Development Division in the Energy Technologies and Renewable Sources Department, are useful. ‘Increasing computing power and reducing energy consumption is a crucial and complex challenge for our sector. The new infrastructure combines power and technologies to handle extremely complex workloads ranging from advanced numerical simulations to big data processing and artificial intelligence.
The Lenovo advantage
Another important factor is that Cresco8 is one of the supercomputers already in operation in Italy, a country that is playing a leading role in the sector, considering that it ranks third in the world in terms of installed processing power. Beyond power, as mentioned, everything hinges on finding the right balance with consumption. This is why solutions such as Lenovo’s water cooling are essential.
Lenovo produced the supercomputer’s beating heart at its Hungarian plant in Üllő, near Budapest. ‘We have been working on cooling technologies for 12 years, which is why we have a 33% global market share. In addition, having a short supply chain allows us to reduce lead times and be faster in implementing solutions,’ explains Alessandro de Bartolo, Country General Manager and CEO of Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group, a division focused on servers, storage and data centres.
There is still a long way to go to produce clean energy from renewable sources by 2050, but we have to start somewhere, and the Cresco8 project and, more generally, the development of a supercomputer network is a clear sign that Italy is capable of excelling. This is a strength that must continue to be nurtured and expanded in the coming years by focusing on innovation, teamwork and funding.
