Powering Italy's Information Society: Cineca Takes Supercomputing Performance to New Levels and Lays the Foundations for Virtualization

Cineca powers Italy's information society as a nonprofit consortium. It provides High-Performance Computing (HPC) services that enable scientists, researchers, educators, students, government, and commercial organizations to share ideas, information, and learning with maximum efficiency and effectiveness. In Bologna, behind the walls of Italy's largest computing center, Cineca has some 500 employees and 1300 HPC servers. Each day, these advanced systems process about 1000 terabytes of data. Cineca takes supercomputing performance to new levels and lays the foundation for virtualization. These high-speed capabilities will become even more critical in the future. The supercomputing system is intended to become the main facility for GARR (the Italian research network). Cineca is also part of the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA) project, which aims at building a distributed architecture among computing centers in Europe using 10 Gigabit connections. There are also plans for data mirroring between Cineca supercomputers and Italy's science community. Cineca decided against a series of tactical IT deployments and instead took a more holistic approach. By aligning their strategy with the Cisco Data Center 3.0, they have increased the chances of success. This way, Cineca was able to evolve their data center after investing in best-practice architectures, for example, for virtualization, plus excellent technical support services. Cineca aims to pass on the benefits directly to the customers.