ENEA, EUROfusion, and CINECA have agreed to invest 50 million euros over five years in the development of a cutting-edge supercomputer for fusion energy research. The new High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure, capable of performing approximately 47 million billion operations per second, will be installed at the Cineca headquarters in Casalecchio di Reno (Bologna) by the end of 2023 and will become part of the Bologna Technopole ecosystem. It will be devoted to plasma physics numerical simulation and structural analysis of advanced materials for nuclear fusion, a safe and sustainable source of energy for future generations. The new HPC structure will connect the EUROfusion scientific community to an Italian ecosystem of international and strategic importance for Europe, which will support the calculation structures for weather and climate forecasts of the European ECMWF center and the European Leonardo supercomputer of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking in the Bologna Technopole. The agreement, signed by Alessandro Dodaro, director of the ENEA Department of Fusion and Technologies for Nuclear Safety, Francesco Ubertini, president of CINECA, and Tony Donné, programme manager (CEO) of EUROfusion, provides for the construction of a supercomputer of approximately 47 petaflops, consisting of a conventional partition (13.6 petaflops) and an accelerated partition (33.7 petaflops), as well as a third Gateway partition that offers a set of additional services and management of users, applications, codes and data. In addition, the infrastructure will assist the European nuclear fusion scientific community in making the best use of these systems in their research fields.
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