National Centre on HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing (CN-HPC)

Project Partners
1. Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare
2. CINECA
3. Fondazione Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici
4. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
5. Centro di Ricerca, Sviluppo e Studi Superiori in Sardegna - CRS4 Srl Uninominale
6. ENEA - Agenzia nazionale per le nuove tecnologie, l'energia e lo sviluppo economico sostenibile
7. Fondazione Bruno Kessler
8. Consortium GARR
9. Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia
10. Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica
11. Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia
12. Politecnico di Bari
13. Politecnico di Milano
14. Politecnico di Torino
15. Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata
16. Università di Roma La Sapienza
17. Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati
18. Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
19. Università degli Studi dell'Aquila
20. Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro
21. Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna
22. Università della Calabria
23. Università degli Studi di Catania
24. Università degli Studi di Ferrara
25. Università degli studi di Milano-Bicocca
26. Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
27. Università degli Studi di Padova
28. Università del Salento
29. Università degli Studi di Trento
30. Università degli Studi di Torino
31. Università degli Studi di Trieste
32. Università degli Studi di Firenze
33. Università degli Studi di Pisa
34. Università degli Studi di Pavia

Project resume:

Extracting value from data explosion is the challenge that scientific, industrial, and institutional actors are currently facing. To this extent supercomputing, numerical simulation, Artificial Intelligence, high-performance data analytics and Big Data management are essential and strategic technologies for understanding and responding to grand societal challenges and in stimulating economic growth, allowing academia and industry to develop services and discoveries.

The CN-HPC project aims to create the national digital infrastructure for research and innovation, starting from the existing HPC, HTC and Big Data infrastructures evolving towards a cloud datalake model accessible by the scientific and industrial communities through flexible and uniform cloud web interfaces, relying on a high-level support team, form a globally attractive ecosystem based on strategic public-private partnerships to fully exploit top level digital infrastructure for scientific and technical computing and promote the development of new computing technologies. 

In this scenario, the CN provides a pivotal opportunity for the national scientific, industrial and socio-economic
system to address current and upcoming scientific and societal challenges, strengthening and expanding existing competences and infrastructural resources.

The CN will be structured according to the hub and spoke model: the hub is responsible for the validation and management of the research program, whose activities are elaborated and implemented by the spokes and their affiliate institutions, as well as through open calls. The hub implements all the activities on education and training, entrepreneurship, knowledge transfer, policy and outreach, and coordinates a transversal research group on Societal Implication and Impact. Hub and spokes consist of Universities, Research Institutions as well as private and public operators. The proposed CN includes one cross spoke, Spoke 0 “Supercomputing Cloud Infrastructure”, and 10 thematic Spokes.

Spoke 0 – Supercomputing Cloud Infrastructure
Spoke 1 - Future HPC & Big Data
Spoke 2 - Fundamental Research & Space Economy
Spoke 3 - Astrophysics & Cosmos Observations
Spoke 4 - Earth & Climate
Spoke 5 - Environment & Natural Disasters
Spoke 6 - Multiscale Modelling & Engineering Applications
Spoke 7 - Materials & Molecular Sciences
Spoke 8 – In-Silico Medicine & Omics Data
Spoke 9 - Digital Society & Smart Cities
Spoke 10 - Quantum Computing

UNIBA Role
UNIBA is spoke leader of Spoke 5 “Environment & Natural Disasters” headed by Prof. Roberto Bellotti. Spoke 5 is devoted to Environment & Natural Disasters and has two main dependent goals:

1) To enhance both the research potential and the efficiency of the scientific community currently engaged in the modelling, simulation and management of natural and anthropic disasters as well as of their effects on the entire ecosystem, from higher organisms to microbial communities;

2) To support society and stakeholders in the definition of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) policies.
The designed strategies consist in building reliable scenarios and simulations, physics-based hazard assessment, big data and machine learning analysis, real time forecasting and early warning, resilience quantification, preparedness and emergency response planning, participatory geographic information systems, virtual reality and EO data processing tools, economic and social computational models.

UNIBA is also involved as affiliated entity in Spoke 2 “Fundamental Research & Space Economy” with activities of Prof. Antonio Marrone. Spoke 2 focuses on basic sciences of theoretical and experimental physics with accelerators and with space- and ground-based detectors for astroparticle physics and gravitational wave investigations. The Spoke also aims at demonstrating the application of the same set of solutions in other domains such as (1) handling of data and processing in Space Economy Italian Strategy; (2) seeding of similar solutions in productive contexts, with industry-research shared testbeds and proofs of concept.

UNIBA is also involved as affiliated entity in Spoke 8 “In-Silico Medicine & Omics Data” with the activities of prof Picardi. On the In-Silico Medicine side, Spoke 8 aims at categorize the use of In Silico Trials technologies to reduce, refine, or replace in vitro, in vivo, or human experiments by using a taxonomy introduced for methods alternative to animal experimentation. Human experimentation is the most ambitious target for In Silico Trials, with a growing difficulty going from the refinement of clinical trials to their reduction, and last to their replacement. On the Omics Data
side, Spoke 8 aims to provide a full proof-of-concept of data production, storage, and analysis, and to investigate drug-target interaction to improve diagnoses and therapies in different pathological conditions (e.g., oncology, neurodegenerative diseases, neurodevelopmental disorders, etc.). Through collaboration with clinics and hospitals, the spoke aims to build a complete pipeline for omics data management and analysis.

UNIBA is also involved as affiliated entity in Spoke 10 "Quantum Computing” with the activities of Prof. Paolo Facchi. Spoke 10 deals with the exploitation of Quantum Computing technology for radical transformations of industrial applications by means of the resolution of complex problems in the field of optimization, simulation and machine learning. First of all, Spoke 10 wants to identify quantum algorithms characterized by a speedup compared with the corresponding classical algorithm. Working on this kind of software applications, eventually using different hardware approaches (e.g. Gate Model Quantum Computing, Quantum Annealer), could accelerate quantum solutions
industrialization. Moreover Spoke 10 wants to use the quantum approach to perform calculations on state-of-the-art classical computers (quantum- inspired algorithms, emulators, tensor network computations) in order to gain significant benefits in terms of algorithms efficiency without using a quantum hardware. The challenge is to redesign and redevelop existing algorithms in the quantum environment from different points of view: programming language, middleware platforms connecting quantum solutions to hardware and the usable toolkits for developers.