What’s a polymath? Well, let’s ask the internet…
Polymath (noun) poly·math ˈpä-lē-ˌmath : a person of encyclopedic learning (Latin: homo universalis, literal translation: 'universal human')
It is arguable that no age of learning created more famous polymaths than the Renaissance. This era, which was born in Italy and extended across the 15th and 16th centuries, is characterized by an effort to revive and surpass the ideas and achievements of classical antiquity. The Renaissance gave birth to famous thinkers such as Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Copernicus, Galileo and so many more. The discoveries of this time have left a timeless mark on science, philosophy, mathematics and art.
We today live in an age that is defined by an even faster pace of discovery. Aided by spectacularly large computational machinery, our world is in a race to calculate, simulate, solve and ultimately understand fundamental universal truths. This quest for knowledge is no stronger than in Italy, where the country’s academic community has joined together to explore the wide landscape of universal learning.
CINECA is an Italian consortium that consists of 69 Italian research universities and 50 public research institutions that all leverage shared CINECA infrastructure in their quest to achieve new scientific breakthroughs. In many ways, CINECA embodies the spirit of the Renaissance - where knowledge is centrally refined and information is broadly shared in an academic setting to surpass the ideas of classical thinking.
To support their mission, CINECA has built the largest computing facility in Italy (which stands as one of the world’s largest computing centers) that today hosts some of the world’s largest high performance computing systems. These machines honor famous Italian polymath inventors by bearing their names:
Leonardo: the world’s 6th fastest computer according to the November 2023 list of the world’s Top500 computers. This system was designed and built by EVIDEN and is accelerated with nearly 14,000 NVIDIA GPUs. The system is a Tier-0 resource for the EuroHPC community.
Galileo100: A cloud-native resource designed to provide Tier-1 support for scientific research across Italy and to the European Interactive Computing e-Infrastructure consortium. This system is actively being upgraded by CINECA
With all of this computing, the question then becomes: how do you capture, protect and serve the knowledge created from this nearly-universal range of scientific computing applications? How do you ensure this data is ready for new forms of learning that will be possible with deep learning? This is where the VAST Data Platform comes in.
Today, we’re overjoyed to announce that CINECA has chosen to entrust their critical data assets to VAST systems as they expand support for the needs of their data-driven cloud computing initiatives. As part of their expansion of the Galileo100 system, CINECA is deploying a 50PB VAST Data Platform that will support the diverse needs of CINECA’s computing tenants and will help power their supercomputing machinery as CINECA explores new domains of data centric analytics and AI computing.
Why VAST?
As CINECA refines its mission, the need for robust infrastructure that can support the needs of different CINECA tenants is critical. By merging cloud-native computing concepts into CINECA’s core HPC agenda, the organization can realize greater infrastructure consolidation, better automation and greater levels of data isolation for users who expect a zero-trust computing environment. VAST’s Data Platform met the needs of CINECA’s cloud HPC agenda while also introducing altogether new levels of systems management simplicity. VAST’s unique approach to combining the simplicity of an enterprise NAS platform with the levels of system scale and performance only previously associated with parallel HPC file systems - VAST is helping CINECA evolve from the fragility and lack of data management that has commonly been associated with parallel HPC file storage.
With VAST, CINECA found a unique mix of capability, simplicity and resilience:
Native multiprotocol data access that makes data accessible via NAS, object and SQL protocols
Support for up to 10K isolated tenants, with advanced encryption to ensure zero-trust
A robust suite of user auditing tools and ransomware protections to enable secure service delivery
A embedded, SQL-compatible data catalog that makes it easy to manage, tag and query data
Superior data reduction, to move beyond storage tiering and serve all data in real-time
Data access from both Ethernet and InfiniBand clusters, with QOS controls that can be defined all the way down to the user-level in order to eliminate noisy neighbor challenges
The result is a high-performance data lake that will underpin CINECA’s HPC and AI efforts. This universal data platform will also help to evolve scientific computing paradigms by providing a zero-trust cloud native data foundation that will meet CINECA ever-increasing demands for responsive and agile cloud infrastructure. We couldn’t be more proud to partner with CINECA and to cultivate the next generation of European polymaths. To learn more about this new partnership, we welcome you to join us at ISC 2024 in Hamburg this week and hear directly from CINECA at our User Group breakfast, grab a quick demo, or just kick back and have a drink with the VAST team at the show.
