Italy's climate super computer, Cassandra, to combine HPC with AI

Boffins in Italy are about to get their hands on a supercomputer that will more than double the resources available to study the effects of climate change.

Dubbed Cassandra, the big iron is based on Lenovo's liquid cooled Neptune system architecture and is slated for deployment at the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC) in Lecce, Italy.

Founded in 2005 as a joint effort by Italy's ministries of environment, finance, and agriculture and forestry, the CMCC is tasked with developing forecast models of the Earth and its oceans, predicting the course of climate change, and establishing policies to mitigate and adapt to the effects of a warming planet.

This work is currently being conducted on CMCC's Juno system, which was deployed in 2022 and is based on Intel's third-gen Xeon Scalable Platform backed by a complement of 20 Nvidia A100 GPUs. Despite spanning 170 nodes, the ...