Nuclear: ENEA installs supercomputer CRESCO8 to boost nuclear fusion research

ENEA has installed a new High Performance Computing (HPC) system called CRESCO8 capable of increasing the pace of research in the energy field and, in particular, on nuclear fusion. The new infrastructure, provided by Lenovo and built in collaboration with Intel, will increase the computational power of CRESCO7, the supercomputer currently in use at the ENEA Portici Research Center (Naples).

The new HPC system will feature reduced energy consumption thanks to Lenovo Neptune water cooling technology which captures up to 98 percent of the heat produced by the supercomputer and saves the energy used for the fans.

The Lenovo infrastructure used for the installation^[1] was built entirely in the company's new Innovation Center in Hungary, where it was designed with state-of-the-art, energy efficient technologies.

“The new CRESCO8 supercomputer is an important technological advancement for ENEA, augmenting computing resources with cutting edge parallel computing systems that also ensure high levels of energy efficiency,” said Giovanni Ponti, head of the ENEA ICT Division of the Energy Technologies and Renewable Sources Department. “CRESCO8 will enable ENEA researchers and all its partners to run numerical codes, computational models, simulations and artificial intelligence algorithms in a next-generation high-performance parallel computing cluster, capable of meeting the new needs of the scientific community and research projects.”

“Today, high-performance computing and artificial intelligence are opening new horizons in crucial areas for our society like sustainable economic development, climate, energy innovation and medicine, research areas in which ENEA is at the forefront,” said Alessandro de Bartolo, CEO and Country General Manager Infrastructure Solutions Group of Lenovo in Italy. “This is why Lenovo is proud to support a center of excellence like ENEA with its technologies, experience and ability to innovate in tackling those global challenges.”

ENEA develops and manages a complex ICT architecture that makes advanced computational, modeling and three-dimensional data visualization systems available to users through an extensive use of GRID supercomputing technologies. The ICT infrastructure compprises 6 research centers (Frascati, Portici, Bologna, Casaccia, Trisaia and Brindisi), each equipped with 3D computing and visualization infrastructures and specialized expertise, and supports R&D activities in different sectors. For example, ENEA conducts forecasting activities to identify energy solutions to improve reliability and efficiency of certain decarbonization processes using digitization technologies.