E4 Computer Engineering, a prominent Italian company in hardware and software solutions with high technological content, has secured the contract to upgrade Galileo 100, the supercomputer of the CINECA Interuniversity Consortium and Tier-1 cloud system for public scientific research serving over 5000 users. The main requirements for the infrastructure upgrade included increasing the number of vCPUs, balancing vCPUs with storage, and implementing multi-protocol storage for data retention and processing.

The upgrade project is expected to bring significant advancements to computational resources available to Italian and European researchers. The project aims to provide a new cloud infrastructure for research on a national and European scale, with flexible resources for frontier scientific projects in various fields. E4 engineers developed a solution based on OpenStack and partnered with Dell to meet the tender requirements.

Dell supplied hardware components such as Dell PowerEdge HS7710 for CPU nodes and Dell PowerEdge R760xa for GPU nodes equipped with NVIDIA GPUs. The collaboration between E4, Dell, and VAST Data resulted in a high-performance solution that exceeded the requirements of the tender. The new infrastructure will support research and innovation projects in computational sciences, providing performance, competitiveness, and AI services.

The collaboration with VAST Data will enable CINECA to create and manage a 50 petabyte data lake connected to various computing infrastructures, supporting research and innovation in Italy and Europe. The partnership between E4, Dell, and VAST Data represents a significant milestone in technological development in supercomputing, supporting scientific innovation globally.