Supercomputing Laboratory
In the course of its history, CIRA has twice been ranked among the TOP500 most powerful supercomputers in the world, in 1993 and 1996. The new supercomputer, named "Partenope," has been operational since December 2025.
CIRA, since its founding, has invested considerable resources in large-scale numerical simulation for aerospace applications.
In the course of its history, CIRA has twice been ranked among the TOP500 most powerful supercomputers in the world, in 1993 and 1996. The new supercomputer, named "Partenope," has been operational since December 2025.
It consists of 118 xFusion computing nodes, each equipped with two Intel Xeon Platinum 8558P processors running at 2.7 GHz, with 48 cores and 512 GB of RAM, for a total of 11,328 cores. The system generates an aggregate computational power of 1 PetaFLOPS, which corresponds to one quadrillion floating-point operations per second.
Node interconnection is provided by InfiniBand technology, featuring a speed of 200 Gbps.
The storage, based on Huawei technology, consists of two independent systems: a high-performance (Tier 1) and one high-capacity (Tier 2), specifically:
- Tier 1: Huawei Oceandisk 1600 i with 452 Terabytes of usable capacity and an aggregate sustained throughput of 26 GB/sec;
- Tier 2: Huawei OceanStor Pacific 9920 + Huawei OceanStor Pacific 9546 with 4 Petabytes of usable storage.
Partenope is complemented by four graphics nodes, each equipped with an NVIDIA A2 GPU, and a Proxmox cluster consisting of three nodes running virtual machines to provide front-end, software provisioning, and backup capabilities. Graphics and Proxmox nodes are of the same type as the compute nodes.
Partenope is used for numerical simulation activities in the fields of fluid dynamics, aerothermodynamics, meteorology, structural analysis, and electromagnetism, utilizing proprietary, commercial, and open-source software.
The supercomputer will soon be expanded with GPU-based compute nodes