Leonardo Supercomputer (CINECA Bologna)

The story

In 2022 CINECA and EuroHPC inaugurated Leonardo at the new Bologna Tecnopolo in northern Italy, breathing new life into a historic 1950s tobacco plant designed by renowned architect Pier Luigi Nervi. Built by Eviden on the BullSequana XH2000 platform, Leonardo features nearly 14,000 liquid-cooled NVIDIA GPUs and Intel Xeon processors delivering 240 petaflops. Running on 100% renewable electricity with direct warm-water cooling, Leonardo anchors the Bologna 'Data Valley' as southern Europe's most potent research engine for drug discovery, astrophysics, and weather modeling.

Notable

• Delivers over 240 petaflops Linpack performance, ranking consistently in the global Top 10.
• Installed inside the Bologna Tecnopolo, a converted former state tobacco manufacturing facility designed by Pier Luigi Nervi.
• Built on Eviden BullSequana XH2000 hardware with 14,000 custom-water-cooled NVIDIA Ampere GPUs.
• Supplies computing capacity to over 4,000 European scientific researchers across medicine and climate modeling.

Expansions

• 2020: EuroHPC and Italian government sign hosting agreement at historic Bologna Manifattura Tabacchi
• 2022: Leonardo inaugurated delivering 240 petaflops sustained performance
• 2024: upgraded with specialized EuroHPC scientific AI data pipelines