Europe's Leonardo pre-exascale system is set for its official inauguration this week following its confirmation as the fourth most powerful supercomputer on the Top500 list at the recent SC22 conference.
Leonardo is the second of the
EuroHPC Joint Undertaking's pre-exascale supercomputers to enter into service following the
LUMI system in Finland back in June. It is expected to be capable of a performance level of more than 249 petaflops when fully operational, and will be officially opened up for access by scientists and engineers at the Bologna Technopole in Italy on November 24. The move means that Europe now has two of the four most powerful supercomputers as ranked in the
Top500 list, behind the US Frontier exascale system and Japan's Arm-based Fugaku system. As with most supercomputers, it will be used for a variety of the most demanding applications including materials science, biomedicine, climate change, engineering, modeling of the human brain, and AI development.
The
Leonardo system itself is built by French IT outfit Atos and based on its BullSequana XH2000 architecture. It comprises two main computing modules, named Booster and Data Centric, to enable it to cover a range of different workloads. According to Atos, the system is equipped with approximately 3,500 Intel Xeon processors and 14,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs. The Booster has 3456 Intel Ice Lake computing nodes, while the Data Centric module has 1536 nodes. The later is based on BullSequana X2140 three-node CPU blades with Intel's 4th Generation Sapphire Rapids Xeon Scalable processors, presumably coming in 2023 when the chips are set to be available. Leonardo will also be augmented by the integration of quantum processors as accelerators in future, according to EuroHPC.
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