History

At the end of the 60' the need of powerful supercomputers for the scientific computing was clearly felt by the Italian academia. In 1969 the Ministry of Education supported four Italian Universities in their effort of consortiating with the aim of creating a supercomputing center, CINECA, hosting the first CDC 6600 designed by Seymour Cray, the father of supercomputing and the first supercomputer located in Italy.

For more than 40 years, CINECA and its HPC department have been leaders in Italy and Europe in the deployment of a solid and trustable HPC environment and in offering a continuous and all-embracing training channel by the way of basic and advanced HPC summer schools and specific courses on HPC tools and techniques. On Summer 1992 CINECA hosted the first edition of “Parallel and Vectorial Computing Summer School “, a course still alive today.

Today CINECA is reference point for the national academic and research system and several research institution in Italy concluded special collaboration agreements to enhance their science with the computational tools and expertise provided here and has agreements with important companies running their computational jobs on their Clusters.