Europe beats the USA and Japan in supercomputers: this is Leonardo | technology

The Leonardo pre-exascale system will be officially launched this week after being confirmed as the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the Top500 list. In this way, Europe overtakes the United States and Japan on the platform.

Leonardo is the second of supercomputers From pre-European exascals. Expected to be able to achieve a level of performance above 249 petaflops When fully operational, it will open to scientists and engineers in Bologna Technopolis (Italy) on November 24.

With this, Europe has two of the four most powerful supercomputers in the Top 500 list, behind System border United States Exascale and order Fugaku Based on ARM from Japan.

Like most supercomputers, They will be used in the most demanding applications such as materials science, biomedicine and climate changeand engineering and modeling of the human brain and the development of artificial intelligence.

The Leonardo system was built by French computer company Atos and is based on their BullSequana XH2000 architecture. It consists of two main compute units, called Booster and Data Centric, that allow it to cover a number of different workloads.

Setting up a dream and one step closer to quantum computers

According to AthosAnd the The system is equipped with approximately 3,500 Intel Xeon processors and 14,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs. The Booster has 3,456 Intel Ice Lake compute nodes, while the Data Centric unit has 1,536 nodes. The latter is based on three-node BullSequana X2140 CPU blades with 4th generation Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids processors.

According to EuroHPC, Leonardo will be expanded by integrating quantum processors as accelerators in the future. Next year, it will join another pre-exascale supercomputer, MareNostrum 5At the Supercomputing Center in Barcelona (Spain).

According to EuroHPC, MareNostrum 5 is designed more for general-purpose computing and artificial intelligence, and will feature a different architecture than Leonardo and LUMI. These are all small steps towards Europe’s first exascale supercomputer, Jupiter.. She should arrive in 2023/2024.

The senior official of the European Commission who spoke to the media explained that the Jupiter tender has not been awarded yet, but the system is expected to be able to be delivered.More than 1,000 petaflops’, what is known as an exascale, when fully functional.

Europe’s progress in the field of supercomputers is impressive. In 2018 there was no grid, and by 2024 it is expected to have a grid that will provide exascale power. It will be thanks to projects like the one in Barcelona (Marinostrom) and paulownia (Leonardo).