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CINECA

DDN EXAScaler Supercharges CINECA’s Early Warning Tsunami Forecasting with the Speed to Save More Lives​

Protecting The People With HPC-Enabled Urgent Computing.

CINECA is one of the largest and most advanced computing centers in Italy, specializing in high-performance computing (HPC), data management, and scientific visualization.

​CINECA has been at the forefront of high-performance computing in Italy since its founding in 1969. Over the years, it has continually expanded its infrastructure and expertise, becoming a pivotal hub for advanced computational research in Europe.​

One of CINECA’s most critical tasks is what they call “urgent computing”, or the need to compute something in a small fixed time window. These tasks generally encompass life-saving endeavors like natural disaster prediction and epidemic modeling. Computing these tasks within a small enough window, however, presents an enormous infrastructure challenge that necessitates paramount speed and efficiency. To ensure their newest cluster, Leonardo, would be able to take on these tasks at the speed required, CINECA turned to DDN’s EXAScaler software.​

Challenges

To highlight an example, tsunami forecasting is an extremely time sensitive task that involves modeling impact at coastal locations based on real-time information once a tsunami is detected. Previously, CINECA and most other computing centers had to wait 20 minutes from the time of detection until their forecast was complete. Now, with DDN EXAScaler, CINECA can complete a forecast within 5 minutes, providing a potentially life-saving increase in time needed for evacuations.​

Solution

DDN EXAScaler Software​

DDN ES400NVX2 All Flash Tier Systems​

DDN ES7990X + 62 SS9012 + 4 ES400NVX HDD Tier Systems​

Benefits

  • Decreased forecasting turnaround time by 400%​

  • Increased GPU Utilization to 99%​

  • CINECA’s Leonardo compute cluster became #1 ranked supercomputer for bandwidth on IO500 list.​

This kind of power needs an extremely well-optimized storage environment to gain maximum efficiency. We chose DDN because of its ability to accelerate all stages of the AI and HPC workloads lifecycle.​
Mirko CestariHPC and Cloud Technology Coordinator​, CINECA