PNRR: the National Centre for HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing kicks off
The activities of the National HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing centre have officially started with an event organized at its future headquarters at the Bologna Technopole.
The kick-off meeting saw the participation of over 400 delegates from the 52 partners and the intervention of the Minister of the University and Research, Anna Maria Bernini.
Established within the framework of the PNRR and financed with Next Generation EU funds for 319,938,979.26 euros, the National Centre will create a next-generation national digital infrastructure for Big Data processing, dedicated to research and industry. From space economy to climate, from fundamental physics to smart cities, from astrophysics to the environment, from engineering to molecular sciences, from omics and in-silico medicine to quantum computing, many strategic sectors will benefit from this new enabling infrastructure.
The project is organized in a hub and spoke structure, with each spoke covering a different thematic area. GARR is among the partners of the initiative and is involved in the "Supercomputing Cloud Infrastructure" spoke, which has the task of managing and coordinating the infrastructure of HPC and big data systems at a national level and is transversal to all the other thematic areas.
The spoke will deal with the evolution of data centres, with particular attention to energy efficiency, the increase of HPC and big data resources, the integration and operation of open source middleware, the management of cybersecurity and the support of users. In this context, the GARR activity will be focused on the enhancement of the GARR-T very high capacity network, which will provide dedicated connectivity for research and education at multiples of the Terabit per second, guaranteeing the low latency interconnection of the computing centres between them and their accessibility by users and applications.
“Being part of this initiative fills us with pride. It is a big challenge for the entire Italian research sector, which once again demonstrates a great unity of purposes” declared Claudia Battista, new director of GARR. “In the coming years, the growth in the production of scientific data will be exponential and we will need very high-performance digital infrastructures capable of growing and keeping pace with the needs of researchers. The GARR-T network, which will be strengthened with the National Centre, is designed precisely to meet these needs: to be fast, flexible and widespread to allow research to be carried out regardless of geographical location."
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