MARCONI-FUSION: The new high performance computing facility for European nuclear fusion modelling

The new European HPC facility for Fusion is in operation since July 2016. It replaces, for European fusion researchers, the Helios supercomputer installed in Japan in the context of the Broader Approach agreement. The supercomputer is hosted at CINECA and it is a fraction of the MARCONI system. Thanks to a customized technical project done by ENEA, in a joint development agreement with CINECA, the European community of fusion modelling can exploit the latest available CPU technologies, following the CINECA HPC roadmap towards 50 PFlops planned for 2019. The MARCONI Fusion fraction is being delivered in two phases: the first one, 1 PFlops of CPU multi-core architecture based on the Intel Broadwell processors, is already in operation since July 2016, and the second one, 5 PFlops of the same architecture based on the INTEL Skylake processors, will be deployed in July 2017. Furthermore the project includes 1 PFlops of the third generation of Intel Xeon Phi many-core architecture (Knights Landing generation).