Cineca

Italy’s largest computing center.

One of the most important sites…

in the world.

My name is Sanzio Bassini, I am Director of Systems and Technology Department at Cineca.

One critical point in our business model is the capability to provide the continued service for different market segment it’s very very crucial. Cineca manages the payroll systems for the university system in Italy. We have critical mission services for the ministry, and at the same time we provide the services for super computing activities that use thousand of processors for hundred of hours.

Breakthrough computing

Making the right choice

We define specification for a new cluster solution and we receive proposal from Cray, HP and Dell also. At the end we considered the characteristics like consistencies of InfiniBand® interconnections, characteristics of the BladeCenter®, the I/O sub-system, and we selected the 1350 provided by IBM, integrated with Cisco, InfiniBand® solution. The BladeCenter® combine the size of the systems that would reduce the complexity of the infrastructures, maintaining consistent performance, cost and management.

Compared to traditional rack systems

• Smaller footprint

• Increased performance

• Lower cost

• Simplified Management

We choose the LS21 Blades and the AMD processors because of two different characteristics. The HyperTransport technology inside of the micro processes would provide sustainable scalability for application. The capability of that Blade technology to be integrated in a dense configuration in a large system with I/O capability that is very very crucial. Very crucial.

Power & Cooling savings

Total cost of ownership

The energy savings are very crucial point, crucial aspect and the IBM Blade solution it can provide to us opportunity to save something in the order of 35-40% mainly in terms of energy saving but in context in terms of total cost of production.

High-performance server interconnectivity

Cisco SFS 7024D InfiniBand server switch

The interconnection performance is to be full bandwidth. Each node in the systems has to be interconnected with each other, has to be non-blocking and the bandwidth has to be balanced with respect of the overall performance of the system.

Cisco InfiniBand® solution provides to us two main characteristics. One because of the size of the switches, the Cisco switch fabric gives to us the capability to integrate large configuration with a small number of switches, in our case two switches.

The second main characteristics is the capability to provide full non-blocking integration of the systems at the very low latency level by mean of real InfiniBand® 4x bandwidth.

IBM and Cisco

The right solution

With IBM and Cisco it’s a solution that provide to us the possibility to avoid, break for maintenance, introduced the high availability of the different component, segment different the area of our infrastructures, in a compatible way with respect of the different market segments.

So from this point of view. Very significant, very successful and we are very much satisfied about the decision we took.