As implementation of the Regional Law 11/2004 "Regional development of the Information Society" and s.m.a, the Emilia-Romagna Region pursues its goal to guarantee - together with the Local Authorities, citizens, agencies and Subjects - the best development conditions for their relationships and activities, promoting the ICT in the provision of services and in the accessibility and exchange of data.
Following the evolution of digital infrastructures and services, the Emilia-Romagna Region has outlined a strategy of development and governance of regional and territorial policies based on data: in this context the Big Data HPC MarghERita Project provides for the creation and management of a supercomputer designed to allow all public Bodies and Health Companies in Emilia-Romagna to exploit, starting from the data, the potential of new technologies.
This HPC (High Performance Computing) has been named "MarghERita" in honour of Margherita Hack, and was financed by the resources of the Fondo per lo Sviluppo e la Coesione (FSC) with a total amount of 3.5 Mln€.
Lepida is the implementing subject: the HPC is composed by 75 computational nodes,each one having 2 Intel Xeon Gold 6336Y processors 2.4 GHz 24 core, a 512GB RAM and a Nvidia Tesla T4 GPU, and a Data Lake composed by a 230 TB flash and 700TB of storage (equally distributed between the Emilia-Romagna datacenter of Bologna and the Lepida Datacenter in Ferrara) and a SW platform for the integration and elaboration of a big amount of data.
MarghERita is available for every Public Administration in Emilia-Romagna to integrate and manage big quantities of information from different sources and make them work together: Municipalities, Unions of Municipalities, Provinces, Healthcare Agencies, Universities, Agencies, Public Services Societies and other national institutions.
Entities interested in using MargERita can participate in the call of interest published by the Emilia-Romagna Region by submitting their own project proposals.
The Emilia-Romagna Region, inside the Big Data Platform Project, has identified four priority but not-exclusive fields of intervention for which the computational power of MarghERita can make the difference: environmental risk management, epidemological surveillance, prevention of road accidents, reduction of pollution. The applications that require large computing capacities are practically endless, if we keep in mind that the peculiarity of these systems is the ability to integrate different sources in order to suggest correlations (those, for example, between certain pathologies and the environmental conditions of a neighborhood), offer solutions (for example, identifying the most congested streets and routes in certain circumstances), promptly modify models and simulations (updating in real time the costs of raw materials and energy expected for a certain project).
