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.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.
With 180 nodes, CMCC's Cassandra is by no means a small system – at least not physically. However, the bulk of those nodes are CPU powered, so it's nowhere near as compute dense as you might expect from a GPU-accelerated cluster. The system's 20,160 Xeon Max cores and 26TB of HBM2e memory are expected to produce 1.2 petaFLOPS of FP64 performance when it comes online later this year.
Launched in early 2023, the Xeon Max is packed with up to 64GB of HBM, capable of feeding the chip's 56 cores with 1TB/sec of memory bandwidth – that's a lot for a CPU. Other chips, like Fujitsu's Arm-based A64FX, have previouslyAs is the case in many HPC and AI workloads, memory bandwidth remains a major performance bottleneck and HBM offers a substantial advantage over traditional DRAM modules – certainly for nuclear weapons sims.
CMCC plans to add a pair of GPU nodes totaling 16 H100 accelerators to Cassandra to accelerate AI workloads. While two nodes might not sound like much, it will actually add an additional petaFLOP of FP64 performance to the system. And for AI workloads, it'll add as much as 64 petaFLOPS at 8-bit precision.Meteorological and climate modeling have traditionally been considered HPC workloads, where double precision FP64 calculations are the gold standard.