“You never stay still,” so he was always told by family and friends. And in that very Sicilian definition, Alessandro Russo, 48-years-old, from Palermo, fully recognises himself. Because only a restless person, animated by curiosity and passion, could start out from a computer assembly and repair shop and become responsible for the infrastructure and cloud of Leonardo's High Performance Computer (HPC) davinci-1, one of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world. His story is an upside-down one. Alessandro, in fact, is an electronics expert who will graduate next December, i.e. years after having already helped design and build not only Leonardo's HPC but also two other supercomputers - Energon and Franklin - belonging to the Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Genoa and the Human Technopole Foundation's HPC in Milan.
Alessandro joined Leonardo in November 2020 and is now also responsible for more than 50 company data centres in Italy. Since technological innovation is transversal, he is inevitably involved in the main high-tech projects: from the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) to the Aerospace City of Turin, via Artificial Intelligence. “My path has been inverted and atypical, I realise that,” he says, “but I have no regrets, because I have always put myself on the line by leveraging an enormous curiosity and a lot of tenacity.” If being curious in some people can manifest itself like a virus, it can be said that Alessandro showed the first signs of contagion as early as middle school, “My father brought home a computer, one of those old-fashioned ones, with the classic cathode ray tube. Instead of turning it on and using it, I first took it apart piece by piece. I wanted to understand its mechanism. My father's annoyance was more than predictable: he told me to put everything back together and make sure the PC worked perfectly.” The teenager, who would then attend the Alessandro Volta Industrial Technical Institute in Palermo, obviously reassembled his home computer and got it running again without any problems.
Alessandro remembers this episode as a "spark", which seems to have illuminated the rest of his career. Starting with the opening of a PC assembly and repair shop in his native Palermo, and at the same time enrolling in a university course in computer engineering, then suspended for a series of family vicissitudes. After working in the IT sector at several companies, including some in northern Italy, he was hired in 2011 in Genoa at IIT. There was the turning point. “Not only because in Genoa I met the woman who would later become my wife, but also because the Italian Institute of Technology allowed me to study and implement all that concerns the infrastructure, construction and management of supercomputers. In Genoa, I met Carlo Cavazzoni, current Head of Digital Infrastructures at Leonardo, with whom I have the pleasure of continuing to work today.” Their respective arrivals in Leonardo date back to four years ago. Together they created the supercomputer davinci-1, capable of carrying out 5 billion floating point operations per second, with a memory capacity of 20 million gigabytes and a read-write speed of 100 gigabytes per second. “I’m so proud of it. And I repeat it also to the students during the meetings in the schools, when I am called to tell my story: curiosity and the desire to grow are the main engine. To do the job means to gain experience, which is essential in any field and for any objective that one intends to pursue.”
Since he doesn't lack tenacity, Alessandro decided three years ago to resume his interrupted university studies. Next December he will graduate in computer engineering with a thesis which - needless to say - will be dedicated to HPC as digital innovators. “It wasn't easy to study while working,” he says, “I did it at night and in my spare time. I had a goal and I wanted to achieve it, not for professional reasons but personal ones.” Managing nine people in the company and at the same time getting back to his studies was no walk in the park, but Alessandro alternates moments of stress with moments of relaxation in the kitchen (“I cook well, to the delight of my wife!”). To young people who are completing a STEM path, in secondary schools or at university, as a future engineer Alessandro Russo can only recommend that they always be animated by curiosity and passion, and keep in mind that “Leonardo is possibly the only company in Italy to have such a vast range of products as to be able to offer infinite possibilities in the study and application of the most advanced technologies.” The right place, in fact, for those who “never stay still.”