Rome, 18 December 2024 12:54
- Research and industry join forces to strengthen Italy’s innovation ecosystem
- Strategic synergy in high-performance computing to translate scientific research into concrete industrial applications
Creating a structured digital services supply chain aimed at the national industrial system to contribute to Italian technological development. This is the goal of the new collaboration between Cineca and Leonardo, which began in 2020 with a framework agreement to develop common synergies in research and technological innovation initiatives.
The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed by Leonardo’s CEO and General Manager, Roberto Cingolani, and the General Director of the Cineca consortium, Alessandra Poggiani.
"The partnership with Cineca aims to make the country's production and industrial system more competitive by using extremely high-performance HPC infrastructures. Per-capita computing and storage capacity are the indicators that today best define a nation’s level of development on a par with, or perhaps more than, the GDP”, said Roberto Cingolani.
For Alessandra Poggiani, "Cineca's institutional mission as the national strategic supercomputing platform also involves technology transfer as a strategic objective. We are convinced that the collaboration with Leonardo, in a virtuous supply chain model that starts with research and ends with application, will be particularly valuable in supporting national economic development and innovation."
With the new partnership, Cineca and Leonardo will make their infrastructure services and highly specialized personnel available to public and private entities to develop one of the most innovative technologies in the industrial field: Generative AI. This technology uses Machine Learning and Deep Learning techniques to create new and original content by learning from massive datasets.
In this context, the computing capabilities of Cineca and Leonardo will be crucial. Both have some of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe and the world, enabling data collection to be transformed into product design, supply chain management and optimization of ongoing production processes.
Specifically, the MoU provides that the Cineca consortium will supply its computational resources for the development of integrated platforms benefiting the national research, higher education and training system, supporting technology transfer to facilitate the use of HPC technologies and expertise by companies.
On the other hand, Leonardo, with its expertise and the critical supercomputing and AI infrastructure represented by davinci-1, will be able to turn into concrete services and applications what has been developed by Cineca, ensuring that the consortium’s solutions have an industrial and business-oriented focus, within a cybersecurity framework that is essential for data protection and preservation. Additionally, Leonardo will make its computational capacity available to Cineca in cases where the consortium is unable to support the workload.
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NOTE TO EDITORS: With a market valued at $42 billion in 2022 and expected to exceed $110 billion over the next decade according to recent market estimates, High-Performance Computing (HPC) technology has become a key indicator of economic development, constituting a strategic resource at the national and European levels to enhance economic and industrial competitiveness.
Supercomputing infrastructures are, and will increasingly be in the future, essential for scientific and technological progress. According to the Italian Digital Agency (AGID), generative AI could generate an economic value of $4.4 trillion annually worldwide. In Italy, the AI market reached a value of €760 million in 2023, marking a 52% increase compared to 2022, with the potential to contribute to GDP growth by as much as 18.2% annually. To achieve this, it is crucial to accelerate the digital transformation of more than 113,000 SMEs in the country: an extraordinary commitment to implementing generative AI in the industrial sector.
From left Simone Ungaro - Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer of Leonardo, Alessandra Poggiani – General Manager of Cineca, Roberto Cingolani - CEO and General Manager of Leonardo, Francesco Ubertini – President of Cineca