MARCONI ranked at number 18 in the June 2018 Top500 list

The Italian supercomputer MARCONI, 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 18 in the Top500 List of the fastest supercomputers in the world.

This latest edition (June 2018) of the TOP500 was announced Monday, June 25, at the ISC18 conference in Frankfurt, Germany. 

The MARCONI computing system installed at Cineca in Autumn 2016 and August 2017 is the largest supercomputer available in Academic sector in Italy today and is the third in Europe.

Marconi system consists at the present of three partitions:

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) consists of 3600 Intel server nodes integrated by Lenovo. Each node contains 1 Intel Knights Landing processor with 68 cores, 16 GB of MCDRAM and 93 GB of DDR4 RAM
3. Marconi – SkyLake (A3 partition) consists of 1512+792 Intel server nodes. Each node contains 2 SkyLake processors each with 24 cores Intel Xeon 8160 and 192 GB of RAM

Total computational power ~20Pflop/s.

The Marconi - A1 partition was number 72 in the November 2017 Top500 list and Marconi - A2/A3 partition, number 14 in the November 2017 list with 7,5 PFlops, is now number 18 with ~8,5 PFlops.

The list reports 5 Italian systems: 2 by Cineca, 3 by ENI (HPC4 rank #13, HPC2 #49 and HPC3 #65), but these three systems 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.