FERMI reconfirmed in the Top500 top-ten!

The Italian supercomputer FERMI, IBM Blue Gene/Q, available to the Italian and European scientific community, is now number 9 in the November 2012 Top500.

The FERMI computing system installed at CINECA in June 2012 for the Italian and European research, in production since August 2012 and officially inaugurated by Minister Profumo in October, remains the larger supercomputer available in Italy today.

The Top500 list of November 2012 published at SC12 in Salt Lake City, ranks FERMI at the 9th position.

FERMI 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.

With the investments funded by the Ministry of Education, University and Research for this system, Italy remains in the top positions of the world-class ranking list and this is a great success that confirms the lead role of CINECA as national supercomputing center serving the Italian scientific community.

With this BG/Q petascale system, one of the PRACE tier-0, CINECA reinforces its position of large-scale facility and its institutional mission of HPC service infrastructure at disposal of the National and European research. FERMI is available to researchers via ISCRA, the Italian SuperComputing Resource Allocation initiative, and via PRACE.