The CRESCO computing laboratory at ENEA consists of a family of Linux HPC (High Performance Computing) Clusters, a large infrastructure for distributed computing. It offers production quality, service-oriented system for high performance and/or high throughput computing. All computing facilities in ENEA are integrated within ENEAGRID (https://www.eneagrid.enea.it), an infrastructure for distributed computing over 6 sites whose main facilities are the HPC CRESCO clusters in operation at ENEA. ENEAs HPC supports R&D activities of several ENEA research groups and external associated partners, in sectors such as alternative energies, energy efficiency, climate and environment, new materials, manufacturing technologies, bioinformatics, transports, security and cultural heritage.
ENEAGRID is characterized by solid structural components, offering reliability and easy management, and by web interfaces which have been user management via in house WARC interface,. The computing resources currently provided to the users are x86-64 Linux systems for a total of 26000 cores.
The ENEA main computing facility is CRESCO6 installed in ENEA Portici. CRESCO6 is an HPC system consisting of 434 dual 24 cores Skylake cpu nodes, ranked 420th in the TOP500 list of Nov. 2018, 1.4 PFlops. It is a Lenovo ThinkSystem SD530 platform, an ultradense two socket server in a 0.5 U rack form factor inserted in a 2U four mode enclosure. The nodes are interconnected by an Intel Omni-Path network with 21 Intel Edge switches 100 series of 48 ports each, bandwidth equal to 100 GB/s, latency equal to 100ns.
Services currently offered by the infrastructure
Several services are offered by the infrastructure:
- Support to design large scale HPC simulations.
- Porting of numerical codes on CRESCO and their optimization for efficient exploitation of the CRESCO infrastructure.
- BigData and AI tools and large storage resources.
- Several numerical codes and tools are already available.
The collaboration with the ENEA staff is the key to design efficient and innovative high-end simulations. Most of the users are ENEA users and they collaborators in national and international projects. The most important results are in the CRESCO report, edited every year. The last year report is available for free at: https://ict.enea.it/category/rapporti-cresco/
Support offered
Computer aided design of new materials and characterization of their physic-chemical properties. Several parallel numerical codes for atomic-scale modelling and visualization are available (Quantum Espresso suite, CP2K, LAMMPS, GROMACS).
All CRESCO users performing computational materials science on CRESCO are gathered in the CRESCO-CMAST (Computational Materials Science and Technologies) Virtual Lab. This laboraty is used to exchange information, best practices and promote new projects. Several European and national projects are currently running on the CRESCO platform.
ENEA is the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development. It is the second major Italian research organization, with around 2700 staff employees distributed in its 9 research centers. The Agency’s activities are focused on Energy Efficiency, Renewable Energy Sources, Nuclear Energy, Climate and the Environment, Safety and Health. ENEA Lab activities are devoted to basic and industrial research exploiting wide-ranging expertise as well as experimental facilities, specialized laboratories, advanced equipment. It develops new technologies and advanced applications; provides public and private bodies with high-tech services, studies, measurements; delivers training and information activities aimed at providing greater awareness on the Agency’s fields of competence, and a higher level of dissemination and transfer of research results, thus promoting their exploitation for production purposes. It is also respectively the coordinator of the National Technology Clusters.
