“The second Italian hub for supercomputing is born, connected to Leonardo which is the most important. It will be the only hub largely dedicated to cybersecurity: a unicum in Italy that makes our country the only one in Europe to have a hub dedicated to cybersecurity. At least 100 people will work here when fully operational. There will be the possibility of developing new technologies and there will be opportunities for PhDs, for researchers, even at an international level”.
Thus the rector of the University of Naples Federico II, Matteo Lorito, on the sidelines of the signing of the memorandum of understanding between Federico II, Cineca and the Municipality of Naples for a new Cineca headquarters with a supercomputing center integrated into the Federico II hub of East Naples.
“This deal – underlines Bruno Frattasi, general director of the National Cybersecurity Agency – it means a lot. In a territory of the South that has significant problems, it is possible, with the joint effort of various institutions, the Region, the Municipality, the Agency, the university, an inter-university consortium, to realize an initiative of great value for the territory because there is an attractive capacity for talents, intelligence and human capital, resources, public and private investments, for a form of regeneration of the territory that needs realities like these in order to have a future of development. This is the great value of realizing initiatives based on strong institutional collaboration and synergy and where European resources of various origins are put together, from the development fund, from the Pnrr, national resources, which converge towards the same objective in a vision that does not allow resources to be wasted and to reach the objective”.
The new headquarters, which expands Cineca's presence in Naples with an increase in staff, with a view to constantly improving the services offered to consortium members, will host a supercomputing system that will be part of the network of high-performance computing (HPC) systems directly interconnected with the Leonardo supercomputer, ranked fourth among the most powerful systems in the world. The Leonardo system, managed by Cineca, was acquired by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking through a joint action between the European Commission and the Italian Government and is hosted at the Tecnopolo data center in Bologna.
The presentation event was attended by representatives of the institutions involved in the project and also by the Minister of University and Research, Anna Maria Bernini.
The investment is part of the actions planned within the ICSC project - National Research Center in HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing, one of the initiatives funded by the Pnrr Mission of the Ministry of University and Research "Education and Research", in reference to the component "From research to business", which provides for the strengthening of research facilities and the creation of "national Research and Development champions" relating to specific enabling technologies such as supercomputing, Big Data processing and the protection of Quantum Computing technologies.
The project is not limited to the creation of the infrastructure but extends to the staff, with a focus on the acquisition and development of excellent skills in the field of HPC technologies. Also today, the collaboration with the National Cybersecurity Agency begins, thanks to the signing of an agreement that provides for a public tender procedure - of which Cineca will be the contracting station - for the acquisition of the Agency's HPC system to be located in the new center in Naples. The system will be dedicated, as provided for by the PNRR, to monitoring the central cyber threat, the HyperSOC, also through the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning tools.
The collaboration between Acn and Cineca also concerns specific development and research activities in the high-performance computing sector and the shared management of the Agency's HPC. Overall, investments for the construction of the computing center, the acquisition of the HPC systems and the operating and management costs will be in the order of approximately 50 million euros, of which over 20 million made available by Acn.
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