Eurotech selected by CINECA to develop the Eurora supercomputer prototype
Amaro (Italy) - 28 June 2012 — Eurotech, a leading company in embedded and supercomputing technologies, announces a co-design agreement with CINECA for the development and installation of a HPC (High Performance Computer) prototype called Eurora, in a project co-founded by PRACE 2IP. Eurotech received an order assignment of 850 thousand euro to delivery within year-end the first release of the new prototype HPC system.
CINECA, a Consortium made up of 54 Italian universities, is the largest Italian computing center and hosts Fermi, the second fastest supercomputer in Europe.
Eurotech, the first company in the industry to offer a commercial hot water cooled supercomputer in 2009, has recently extended such technology to hybrid energy-efficient systems. This is in line with the CINECA goal to set up a many integrated core prototype with hot water cooling to implement a system that excels in power saving and lowers total cost of ownerships (TCO) without any compromise in computing performance.
Energy consumption is an important challenge to develop the next generation of supercomputers, performing at exascale level (1 billion billion operations per second). The unavoidability and severity of the problem needs a quest for solutions: the answer relies in maximizing energy efficiency through all levels, from processors to the entire data centre. This is the holistic approach that Eurotech and CINECA want to follow.
CINECA 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.
"The new Eurora prototype system will be available to scientists in Europe, and will represent the first step for the creation of a 'Datacentric Exascale Lab' in Italy," says Sanzio Bassini, CINECA HPC Associate director.
Each Eurora rack, derived from the Aurora product line, will be able to deliver a computational performance above 300 TFlops, with a compelling energy efficiency of more than 2.5 GFlops per watt. Like in all Eurotech Aurora systems, each component of the new prototype will be hot water cooled, allowing free cooling even in the warmest countries, with a dramatic reduction of operational costs.
About Eurotech
Eurotech (ETH.MI) is a global company based in Italy and with subsidiaries in Europe, North America and Asia. The Eurotech Group develops and markets miniaturized computers for special uses (NanoPCs) and computers featuring high computing capacity (HPCs High Performance Computers). With these two product categories Eurotech aims to become a leader in the implementation of the pervasive computing scenario which, by exploiting the Cloud IT infrastructure, is capable of enabling an entire range of value-added activities and services in the transport, logistics, security, industrial and medical sectors. Learn more about Eurotech at www.eurotech.com
