Europe puts its machine on NVIDIA accelerators
On 24 November 2022 EuroHPC and CINECA inaugurated Leonardo in Bologna, a BullSequana XH2000 from Atos on Intel Xeon Platinum 8358 processors and NVIDIA A100 SXM4 64 GB accelerators. On that month's TOP500 list the machine came fourth in the world: 1,463,616 cores, 174.70 petaflops on Linpack against a peak of 255.75, drawing 5,610 kilowatts. Italy's president Sergio Mattarella attended the ceremony.
Why it matters
Half a year after LUMI the same programme delivered a second machine, and this one not on European or AMD parts but on A100s. The difference between the two machines shows how short the list of options really was: sovereignty here concerns who allocates the time, not who makes the chips.
The joint investment by the Joint Undertaking and the Italian Ministry of Universities and Research came to EUR 120 million. The Leonardo Consortium is led by Italy and also holds Austria, Greece, Hungary, Slovenia and Slovakia. Half the computing resources go to EuroHPC users through open peer-reviewed calls. On the day of the opening the machine was not yet at full power: that was expected in the first half of 2023 at around 250 petaflops. CINECA is a non-profit consortium of 70 Italian universities, 40 national institutions and two ministries. What the record does not claim. It names no accelerator count: the roughly 14,000 the report gave is in neither the EuroHPC release nor the TOP500 entry, and the CINECA page the report cited as its second source answers 403 to both a direct request and the browser pane and has no archive copy. For the same reason the budget of EUR 240 million does not enter: the primary source for this date gives 120.