Contribute to the sustainability objectives of IT platforms and the EU directives on Green Computing thanks to the ability to make the execution of applications in a data centre more energy efficient.
This is the objective of SEED, a European Union research programme, led by Leonardo, and which makes use of partnerships with leading companies in their respective sectors and start-ups such as E4, GemaTEG, Modelway, as well as the involvement of Cooltech and the University of Bologna.
High-performance computing infrastructures (clusters for High Performance Computing) are a key tool for ensuring the competitiveness of the Italian industrial system. At the same time, microprocessor manufacturing technology has ceased to guarantee exponential improvements from one generation to the next, with the consequence that today the computational performance of HPC systems is limited by the consumption of electrical power and the thermal dissipation of the processors that compose them. It follows that the economic and environmental sustainability of such devices is linked to energy and cooling efficiency.
The SEED project, which will last 18 months, aims to develop and implement technological solutions for HPC infrastructures that allow the reduction of processing costs through an increase in energy efficiency and the reduction of cooling costs of HPC systems, both of single applications and of the workload of a data centre as a whole.
These transformations will be crucial for davinci-1, Leonardo's supercomputer which, like many HPC infrastructures of its class, is destined to evolve over time with a view to green computing.
The programme is funded by BI-REX with a call for proposals in June 2023. Among the 8 national Competence Centers established by the Ministry of Business and Made in Italy, within the framework of the government's Industry 4.0 plan, BI-REX is a public-private consortium focused on the Big Data theme, which brings together 60 players in partnership including Universities, Research Centres, and companies of excellence in the sector.
