EUROfusion: Marconi selected to support european research on fusion

An all-Italian partnership between ENEA and CINECA has been selected by EUROfusion, the European Consortium for the development of fusion energy, to deliver high-performance computing and data storage to support European research on fusion.

The 29 Countries members of the European Consortium for the Development of Fusion Energy will be able to use a partition of the MARCONI, the new Italian supercomputer hosted by the CINECA, until the end of 2018. The machine will replace the Japan-based supercomputer HELIOS, set up in the International Fusion Energy Center in Rokkasho. 

Supercomputing services are essential to fusion energy research in order to attain fusion electricity production by the middle of this century. A crucial role is played by computational modelling of materials and plasma as a validation of the experimental results obtained by the ITER machine and as a basis for the design of the new generation DEMO machine.

Significant progress has been made over the last years, with 30 MEuro budgets every five years for the renewal of the calculation infrastructures and the funding of the related support activities.

MARCONI-Fusion is an integral part of the MARCONI infrastructure, which aims at ranking high globally. The development plan entails a 50 million euro investment to be implemented in two phases: currently 806 nodes of the approximately 1500 of the MARCONI are dedicated to fusion, for a total calculation power of over 1 Pflops. By the end of the current year an 11 Pflops section, based on the Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing will be added and by July 2017 the system will reach a total computational power of 20 Pflops, with a storage capacity of 17 PBytes and an electric power of approximately 3 MWatts.

Today at the inauguration ceremony attended the President of ENEA Federico Testa and Director of CINECA David Vannozzi, together with Tony Donnè, Programme Manager of EUROfusion.

"ENEA and CINECA- emphasized the two Presidents- share the task of providing a world-leading scientific community with an excellence service and are committed to addressing both the scientific issues and the more specific operational ones.
ENEA and CINECA wish to take this opportunity both to strenghten their collaboration and to consolidate their relationship with EUROfusion in the longer term”.
ENEA and CINECA have an ongoing collaboration on the supercomputing infrastructures and activities based on a first level center (TIER-0), CINECA and some second level centers (TIER-1), including ENEA with its CRESCO infrastructure.