Innovation: From ENEA new supercomputer CRESCO8 for energy and digital transition It ranks at number 230 in the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest computers

CRESCO8 is the ENEA new supercomputer equipped with computational capabilities capable to support research and development in strategic sectors like fusion energy, climate change, artificial intelligence and advanced materials.

Inaugurated at the ENEA Research Center in Portici (Naples), the CRESCO family supercomputer is housed ina 150-square-meter dedicated facility designed to maximize its efficiency. Universities, research institutions and companies will be able to access the supercomputer to conduct projects requiring advanced HPC (High Performance Computing) resources.

“With CRESCO8 ENEA confirms its leading role in providing computational resources to both national and international scientific communities. The technological innovations applied in the systems architecture and facility design make it a state-of-the-art infrastructure in both technology and energy efficiency” said Giorgio Graditi, Director General of ENEA.

One of the most important applications of CRESCO8 will be to support the PNRR Divertor Tokamak Test Facility Upgrade (DTT-U) project to improve the reliability of the systems of the DTT fusion energy facility under construction at the ENEA Frascati Research Center (Rome). Specifically, the supercomputer will enable advanced modeling and simulations of plasma behavior in nuclear fusion reactions.

 “Increasing computing power while reducing energy consumption is a crucial and complex challenge. The new infrastructure combines power and technologies to handle extremely articulated workloads ranging from advanced numerical simulations to the processing of big data and artificial intelligence,” said Giovanni Ponti, head of the ENEA Division Systems Development for Computing and ICT of the Energy Technologies and Renewable Sources Department.

 “In terms of computing capacity” he said “with over 9 PFlops of computational power, CRESCO8 marks a significant improvement over the previous CRESCO6 andCRESCO7 systems which reached a combined 2 PFlops.

CRESCO8 is a Lenovo ThinkSystem SD650 V3 Neptune system, consisting of 758 nodes, equipped with Intel Xeon Platinum 8592 CPUs, which offer high computational capacity and better energy efficiency thanks to Lenovo Neptunes water-cooling technology, which captures up to 98% of the heat generated by the supercomputer, reducing cooling energy consumption by up to 40%.

This week CRESCO8 has been included at number 230 in the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest computers, as it was announced at the ISC conference in Hamburg.

Video on Cresco8 made by Leonardo ETS Foundation in collaboration with ENEA