The "Leonardo" supercomputer of the Cineca inter university consortium in Bologna has reached saturation level, and a "queue" of projects waiting to be developed is beginning to form. Announcing this is the nonprofit consortium made up of 117 public entities, which points out that the supercomputer inaugurated in November 2022, the sixth-largest machine in the world in terms of computing power but second in terms of artificial intelligence applications, already has "more demand than supply”. In an interview, Cineca President and Director General Francesco Ubertini and Alessandra Poggiani point out that "for the past year and a half, the demand for supercomputing to train artificial intelligence has been growing exponentially”. If they had trained ChatGpt4 on Leonardo, dedicating the supercomputer only to that, it would have taken 120 days," Ubertini says. "It took them a little longer. And we are just at the beginning of this artificial intelligence curve, there is so much demand". Moreover, Leonardo is not a computer dedicated only to AI: it is also used for applications ranging from weather forecasting to the study of galaxies or elementary particles or materials, to the development of new drugs, the acceleration of clinical trials or the creation of digital twins. Among the fastest growing areas in demand for supercomputing resources are the life sciences, from genomics to personalization.
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