A co-design agreement has been announced between CINECA and Eurotech for the development and installation of a high-performance computing (HPC) prototype dubbed ‘Eurora’. The project, which is co-founded by PRACE 2IP, has tasked Eurotech with delivering the first release of the new prototype HPC system within year-end and the company has received an order assignment of €850,000 to do so.
CINECA, a non-profit consortium made up of 54 Italian universities, is the largest Italian computing centre. Host to Fermi, the second fastest supercomputer in Europe, it will deploy this new prototype system in the fields of computational sciences, including fundamental constituents of matter, condensed matter, astrophysics, life sciences and Earth sciences.
In 2009, Eurotech became the first company in the industry to offer a commercial hot water-cooled supercomputer and it has recently extended such technology to hybrid energy-efficient systems. This complements the CINECA goal to set up a many integrated core prototype that utilises hot water cooling and delivers power savings and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) without any compromise in computing performance.
Derived from Eurotech’s Aurora product line, each Eurora rack will be able to deliver a computational performance above 300 Tflops, with an energy efficiency of more than 2.5 Gflops per Watt. Each component of the new prototype will be hot water cooled, allowing free cooling even in the warmest climates.
