High Performance Computing Resources

HAL is the current High Performance Computing Facility, managed by the ICT Support Squadron for Meteorology (ReSIA-GSIM) and released to the Italian Air Force Operational Centre for Meteorology (COMET, formerly managed by CNMCA, Italian Air Force National Centre for Meteorology and Climatology ) for operations in the middle of 2016. The computing facility is 76 nodes based on Hewlett Packard Enterprise DL360 hybrid architecture with Intel Broadwell and NVIDIA Kepler architecture, the amount of volatile memory for each node is 256 GB. The operational network infrastructure is based on Mellanox InfiniBand FDR technology. The overall peak performance of the Computing Facility is around 300 Teraflops. HAL entered in HPCG list at rank 85 in June 2017, rank 98 in June 2018, and rank 112 in June 2019. Nevertheless, HAL is in continuous development. In particular, some upgrades have been planned to increase the number of computing nodes, based on Hewlett Packard Enterprise DL360 with Intel SkyLake and NVIDIA Pascal architecture and a new InfiniBand EDR topology.