MARCONI ranked at number 12 in the newly Top500

The Italian supercomputer MARCONI, Intel Xeon Phi, available to the Italian and European scientific community by ISCRA and PRACE, the two inititiatives available to gain access to the system by a peer-review procedure, is now number 12 in the Top500 List.

This latest edition of the TOP500 was announced Monday, November 14, at the SC16 conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. 

The MARCONI computing system installed at Cineca in Autumn 2016 is the larger supercomputer available in Italy today.

Marconi system consists of three partitions (from which 2 are available at the moment):

1.  Marconi – Broadwell (A1 partition) consists of 21 Lenovo NeXtScale racks with 72 nodes per rack. Each node contains 2 Broadwell processors each with 18 cores and 128 GB of DDR4 RAM.
2.  Marconi – KNL (A2 partition) will be deployed by the end of 2016 and will consist of 3600 Intel server nodes integrated by Lenovo. Each node contains 1 Intel Knights Landing processor with 68 cores, 16 GB of MCDRAM and 96 GB of DDR4 RAM.

The Marconi - A1 partition is now number 57 in the Top500 list and Marconi - A2 partition is numer 12 in the same list. Three further Cineca systems are ranked in the list. 

In this list are ranked 6 Italian systems, 4 by Cineca (3 avaiable to users) and 2 by ENI, but these system are managed by Cineca too, under the Eni-Cineca framework contract.

MARCONI is available to researchers via ISCRA the Italian SuperComputing Resource Allocation initiative and via PRACE.