Eurotech selected by CINECA to develop the Eurora supercomputer prototype

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.