Creare e rafforzare una tecnologia europea per il calcolo ad alte prestazioni per accelerare l’addestramento di modelli intelligenti e risolvere problemi scientifici fondamentali. A questo lavorerà per i prossimi due anni, un gruppo di studiosi dei dipartimenti di Ingegneria e Scienza dell’Informazione, Fisica e Matematica dell’Università di Trento coinvolto nel progetto europeo Net4Exa. UniTrento è tra gli otto partner dell’iniziativa, coordinata dal centro di ricerca francese Cea e vede tra i partecipanti anche Grecia e Norvegia. È sostenuta dal programma Horizon Europe nell'ambito di EuroHPC, un progetto europeo per la creazione di una rete di supercomputer ad alte prestazioni e di centri di calcolo di eccellenza in tutta Europa. Il finanziamento totale ammonta a 71 milioni di euro. L’obiettivo è costruire sistemi di calcolo ad altissime prestazioni in grado di realizzare enormi quantità di operazioni in tempi brevi. Flavio Vella, professore di Informatica al Disi, è il principal investigator dell’unità di Trento.
Per l’Europa, la sfida di diventare leader mondiale in settori come la medicina, lo sviluppo industriale e la ricerca scientifica dipende anche dalla capacità di sviluppare modelli matematici e predittivi sempre più sofisticati che richiedono sistemi di calcolo ad alte prestazioni (High Performance Computing). Oggi è costruire supercomputer avanzati progettati per risolvere problemi complessi di elaborazione, capaci di eseguire milioni di miliardi di azioni al secondo. Raccontato in questi termini, il lavoro può apparire distante e difficile da immaginare per chi non è esperto. Ma se si pensa all’ impatto e alle possibilità che ricerche di questo tipo avranno sulla vita delle persone, si può comprendere perché l’Europa stia investendo nel settore dell’HPC. Il calcolo ad alte prestazioni consente infatti di poter simulare esperimenti che non possono essere eseguiti in laboratorio e che sarebbero impossibili o richiederebbero troppo tempo ai computer tradizionali e che però interessano molteplici ambiti di studio: dalla climatologia alla biomedicina, dalla fisica nucleare alla ricerca aerospaziale, solo per citarne alcuni. «L'obiettivo finale del progetto nel quale siamo coinvolti – spiega Vella – è realizzare la prossima generazione di tecnologie di interconnessione di rete, per garantire una comunicazione sempre più veloce tra le unità di elaborazione presenti in un Supercomputer. Il gruppo di ricerca dell’Università di Trento contribuirà a vari livelli: sia sullo sviluppo dell’architettura dell’hardware,
An advanced interconnect for HPC and AI systems
Fast and efficient supercomputers made in Europe: UniTrento in the Net4Exa project
Creating and strengthening a European high-performance computing technology to speed up the training of intelligent models and solve fundamental scientific problems: this is the goal of a group of scholars from the departments of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Physics and Mathematics of the University of Trento who, the next two years, will work in the European project Net4Exa. UniTrento is among the eight partners of the project, which is coordinated by the French research centre CEA and includes participants from Greece and Norway. Funds are provided by Horizon Europe as part of EuroHPC, a European project that aims to create a network of high-performance supercomputers and computing centres of excellence throughout Europe. The total funding amounts to 71 million euros. The project seeks to build very high-performance computing systems that can perform huge amounts of operations in a short time. Flavio Vella, professor of Computer Science at Disi, is the principal investigator of the Trento working group.
For Europe, the challenge of becoming a world leader in areas such as medicine, industrial development and scientific research also depends on its ability to develop increasingly sophisticated mathematical and predictive models that require high performance computing (HPC) systems. The challenge therefore today is developing advanced supercomputers, designed to solve complex processing problems and capable of performing trillions of actions per second. In these terms, what needs to be done may seem distant and hard to imagine. However, if you think about the impact and the opportunities that research of this type will have on people's lives, you can understand why Europe is investing in HPC. High-performance computing allows us to simulate experiments that cannot be performed in the laboratory and that would be impossible or would take too long for traditional computers. They involve multiple areas of study: from climatology to biomedicine, from nuclear physics to aerospace research, just to name a few. "The ultimate goal of the project in which we are involved – explains Vella – is to create the next generation of network interconnection technologies, to ensure faster communication among the processing units of a supercomputer. The research group of the University of Trento will contribute to the development of the hardware architecture and to the programming model, validating on different scientific applications. "The applications will be provided by the departments involved and, in particular, by the Department of Information engineering and computer science - Disi. The Department of Mathematics will work on a mathematical model for cardiac and cardiovascular simulation, while the Department of Physics will develop molecular dynamics models."
The project started formally in December and will last until February 2027, and represents another step in the development of the initiatives of the national resilience and recovery plan - PNRR, such as the National HPC Centre, Big Data and Quantum Computing, which includes the University of Trento. The three UniTrento departments that, with their scholars, are part of the Net4Exa consortium, are specialized in the development of basic research and in high performance computing for the acceleration of scientific and artificial intelligence applications. They will make their know-how available to implement the technology and to validate it. To do this, a team of experts has been created that includes: Vella, Fabrizio Granelli, Philippe Velha, Sandro Fiore, Domenico Siracusa, Alberto Montresor of Disi; Luca Tubiana and Raffaello Potestio for the Department of Physics; Simone Pezzuto for the Department of Mathematics. The three departments will focus on the study, development and validation of network technology to accelerate artificial intelligence applications, contributing to future generations of components made in Europe.
But what is the impact of this project? Why is it important? "The broader goal is to develop European technology for the next generation of supercomputers while maintaining competitiveness and performance comparable to US technology that has been setting the pace historically and dominates the rankings" professor Vella explains. He mentions two European supercomputers, to make an example: Leonardo, among the ten most powerful computers in the world, operating at the Cineca technopole in Bologna, is focused on pharmaceutical research and climate change; and Jupiter, in Germany, is the latest supercomputer under construction that will have unprecedented computing power, as it will be able to perform more than one billion billion calculations per second. This will make it possible to face complex challenges in different areas, such as climate change, pandemic management and sustainable energy production, exploiting the potential of increasingly large and effective artificial intelligence models. Another step on the path to high-performance computing technology across Europe.