FERMI, the CINECA IBM Blue Gene/Q system, today is the 7th most powerful system worldwide!

The FERMI computing system installed at CINECA in June 2012 for the Italian and European scientific and industrial research is the most powerful supercomputer available in Italy today. The Top500 list of June 2012, published on the 18th, ranks FERMI, the Italian national supercomputer, at the 7th position.

The FERMI new Italian computing system is an IBM Blue Gene/Q configured with 10.240 PowerA2 sockets running at 1.6GHz, with 16 cores each, for a total of 163.840 compute cores and a system peak performance of 2.1 PFlops. Each processor comes with 16Gbyte of RAM (1Gbyte per core).

A complex I/O storage subsystem with a total capacity in the order of ten PByte and a front-end bandwidth in excess of 100 GByte/s complements the computing system.

Particular attention has been applied in designing the cooling infrastructure of the CINECA data center for the hosting of the FERMI system, combining liquid cooling with air free cooling capability. The combination of the data center infrastructure with the high level of Flops per Watt of the Blue Gene / Q system results in a very effective PUE in the order of 1.15.

Together with FERMI, other PRACE systems are ranked in the first 10 positions of the Top500, as SUPERMUC (at LRZ in Munich), JUQUEEN (at FJZ in Juelich as first stage of the next PRACE Tier-0 installation cycle) and CURIE (at CEA in France). This confirms the important action that PRACE is deploying in the European and worldwide panorama of High Performance Computing.

Read here the complete press release.