A supercomputer designed to allow all public Entities and regional Healthcare Services to take advantage of the new technologies’ potentialities.
It was named MarghERita, it has 150 microprocessors and it is part of the Big Data Platform project in which Emilia Romagna Region invested 3.5 millions of euros, coming from the FSC (Development and Cohesion Fund).
This is an Emilia-Romagna Region’s project, possibile thanks to Lepida’s support and the involvement of iFAB (Big Data Foundation), and aimed to contribute to subjects such as the management of environmental risks, epidemiologic surveillance, car crash prevention and pollution reduction.
MarghERita is at Emilia-Romagna’s Public Administrations’ disposal to be employed to integrate and manage vast amounts of data harvested from different sources, and to allow Municipalities, Unions of Municipalities, Provinces, Healthcare Services, Universities, Agencies, Public Services Societies and other National Institutions to work together.
Since they consist of extremely complex infrastructures which can hardly be set up by a single Entity, sharing was found to be the most efficient solution.
The bid, which opened on 1st march and has a duration of 12 months, is available, according to Law 165/2001, for any Public Administration and Public Entities on Emilia-Romagna Region’s territory.
It is also possible to participate as a group of Entities, provided that a group leader is chosen.
There will be three kinds of regional projects to present: project that have already been realized but need to be extended, projects that have been defined but haven’t been implemented yet and ideas yet to be developed.
The parameters, according to which the projects will be evaluated will be: purposes, methodology, sources of the data to employ, collaborations, impact of the project, planned actions, schedule, resources needed - both in terms of algorithms and use of MarghERita - and professional profiles involved.
All the projects considered eligible will be launched, up to the system’s computing capacity’s saturation.
MarghERita is an High Performance Computer (HPC) provided with 75 physical nodes, each of whom is composed by two Intel Xeon Gold 6336Y 2.4GHz 24 core processors, with 512GB of RAM, Nvidia Tesla T4 data elaboration card, a 230 terabytes flash memory “data lake” and 700 terabytes archive space.
The system employs modules that were specifically adapted from open source solutions and it was conceived in order to grant “multi-tenancy”, namely, to be able to serve several users at the same time.
