Customer Case Study

Business ChallengePredicting the impact of a volcanicactivity – right down to details such aswhere and how fast lava will flow –requires huge amounts of computingpower and data storage. Mount Vesuviusnear Naples in Italy is one of the world’smost dangerous volcanoes; it is stillactive and it has more than three millionliving in its shadow. It is known infamouslyfor the destruction of the Roman city ofPompeii. Assessing risk management inthe event of an eruption is just one of thehigh-profile and life-critical projectsundertaken by Cineca, Italy's largestcomputing centre and one of the top fivein Europe. It ranks number 44 among theworld's top 500 computing centres.

Cineca in Bologna in Northern Italy is aConsortium of 31 Universities plus theConsiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche(CNR -The National Research Council)and the Ministry of University andResearch. It provides a range of HPC

services to the Italian academic system,the Italian government and variousresearch and commercial organisations.Services include supportingcommercial and academic research intosubjects such as science, medicine,chemistry and geophysics. Cineca alsoprovides support for universitymanagement and administrationsystems for over 65 universities in Italyand the transfer of research anddevelopment into the industrial andcommercial market.

Demand of Cineca services isincreasing dramatically. Currently somehalf a million accounts accessapplications hosted on one of the fiveHPC computer systems that Cinecamanages. The organisation currentlyhandles around 600 terabytes of data,but this is expected to reach 1-petabyte(one quadrillion bytes) soon. In contrast,eBay worldwide represents around twopetabytes of data.

Cineca, Italy’s Largest Computing Centre, Cuts Costsand Accelerates Social and Scientific Research withCisco and IBM High-Performance Computing

Cisco’s high-performance computing (HPC) InfiniBand andEthernet networks and IBM's System Cluster 1350 helps Cinecahalve ROI period and reduces maintenance costs and demandon resources by 20 percent

Executive Summary

Customer NameCineca

Location Bologna, Italy

Number of Employees350 employees

Industry Technology

Business challenge• Significant increase in demand

for HPC services• Customer projects and

applications becoming morecomplex, data intensive andbusiness critical

• Demand on data centrecapacity expected to rise froma half to 1-petabyte

Network solution• Cisco HPC InfiniBand and

Ethernet networks • Cisco Ethernet and InfiniBand

switch models for IBMBladeCenter

• Cisco storage area network(SAN) solution

• IBM System Cluster 1350

Business value• Reduces the cost and

increases the speed ofdeveloping life-enhancingsocial and scientific research

• Improves reliability andperformance of HPC servicesand facilities

• Return on investment cut by50 percent from 3 years to 18 months

• Demand on maintenancecosts and resources reducedby 20 percent

• Service reliability andavailability increased

Cineca embarked upon three key projects– a complete overhaul of its network, anew SAN, and the development of newHPC clusters to accommodate increasingdemand from customers and to provideHPC services in a more cost-effective way.Cineca turned to two key players in HPCand data centre networking arena – Cisco and IBM.

Sanzio Bassini, Director of Systems andTechnology at Cineca, says, “We werealready using Cisco for much of ournetworking infrastructure, neverthelesswe carried out a very comprehensiveanalysis of the market. It did not take longto realise that the partnership betweenCisco and IBM, and the quality of theirHPC, SAN and data centre technology,added up to a pretty powerful solution.One of the critical factors in HPCclustering is the ability to interconnect thenodes and move data between themquickly – something on which the Ciscotechnology really delivers.”

Network Solution Cineca has a single data centre at itsheadquarters in Bologna and haspositioned Cisco and IBM at the heart ofits HPC infrastructure. Cineca hasdeployed a Cisco HPC networking

architecture, comprising Cisco Ethernetand InfiniBand switch models for IBMBladeCenter technologies, andInfiniBand and Ethernet networks for theHPC cluster. This is part of an IBMSystem Cluster 1350 which includesover 1,200 BladeCenter servers. Thesolution provides 10-gigabit InfiniBandconnectivity with support for over half 1-petabyte of data

Additional Cisco networkingtechnologies support links betweendifferent server clusters and a CiscoSAN for data storage and backup to andfrom the clusters. The Cisco networksupports interconnectivity speedsacross more than 300 applications,presentations and database servers ofbetween 1-gigabit and 4-gigabits, and a10-gigabit fibre backbone. Moreover,Cineca has five HPC computing systemsin its data centre including the Cisco andIBM clusters and a HP computer.

Cisco and IBM have enabled Cineca todevelop an architecture which canseparate academic and research trafficfrom commercial user traffic. The formeruses the Italian Academic and ResearchNetwork, GARR (Gestione AmpliamentoRete Ricerca), around Italy to accessCineca's facilities.

Customer Case Study

“As one of Europe's leading computing centres,demand for our high-performance computingservices and facilities to support vital researchand development projects is increasing all thetime. Soon we expect to exceed 1-petabyte ofdata. The impact of deploying technology fromCisco and IBM to improve the cost, quality andcapacity of services we can offer ourcustomers is very significant.”

—Sanzio Bassini, Director of Systems and Technology, Cineca

Customer Case Study

Business ResultsThe Cisco and IBM HPC solution hashad a significant impact on improvingcustomer service and the costeffectiveness of Cineca's business and operations.

“As one of Europe's leading computingcentres, demand for our high-performance computing services andfacilities to support vital research anddevelopment projects is increasing all thetime. Soon we expect to exceed 1-petabyte of data,” says Bassini. “The impact of deploying technology fromCisco and IBM to improve the cost, qualityand capacity of services we can offer ourcustomers is very significant. Projectssuch as assessing and improving riskmanagement if Mount Vesuvius erupts ordeveloping a new generation in moleculardynamics, would not have been possiblebefore deploying the Cisco InfiniBand andEthernet networks and IBM System Cluster1350 solution.”

The Cisco and IBM equipment enablesCineca to reduce the cost and resourcesneeded to manage its HPC data centreso it is able to offer customers servicesand facilities that are more efficient andmore cost effective.

Because of the low latency and highperformance of Cisco's HPC solution,processing times for the complexscientific codes are reduced, savingresearchers weeks and even monthsand speeding the time to achieveresults. Return-on-investment time forthe project is expected to be cut by 50percent from three years to just 18months. These savings have beenachieved by being able to use existingHPC resources to provide more andbetter services to customers, faster.

Cineca has also been able to achievethese savings because the Cisco and IBMtechnology significantly reduces thingslike maintenance and support overheads.Cineca has cut maintenance operationsand costs by 20 percent through greaterreliability and a more streamlinedinfrastructure. In addition, Cisco hasallowed Cineca to reduce its physicalnetwork. To maintain and guarantee qualityof service and performance, Cinecaseparates commercial and academic andresearch traffic.

Prior to Cisco and IBM, Cineca did thisby having two separate networks. ButCisco has enabled Cineca to have asingle, physical infrastructure and use

“Projects such asassessing andimproving riskmanagement if Mount Vesuviuserupts ordeveloping a newgeneration inmolecular dynamics,would not havebeen possiblebefore deployingthe Cisco InfiniBandand Ethernetnetworks and IBMSystem Cluster1350 solution.”

—Sanzio Bassini, Director of Systems and Technology, Cineca

Customer Case Study

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Cisco's intelligent networking capabilitiesto create two 'virtual' networks whichoffer both commercial and academiccustomers equally high levels of servicequality and performance.

A further benefit to customers has beenan increase in reliability and servicesavailability. The configuration of theCisco and IBM HPC technology allowsdifferent systems and applications to beeffectively partitioned. Consequently, if aspecific application or function of anapplication fails or requires a change itcan be done without impacting orstopping other associated applications.

Part of the benefit of the Cisco and IBMcollaboration has been knowledgesharing and transfer for both Cineca andfor its customers. “Cineca's mission is toprovide its customers with the mostadvanced and innovative solutionsavailable,” says Bassini. “Cisco and IBMhelped Cineca develop the new HPCand offered advice and expertise onhow best to use it to provide ourcustomers with best solutions and thebest level of services.”

Bassini sees Cisco and IBM as part ofCineca's HPC vision of the future, “Ibelieve the future of HPC is what I call asystem network, which means theintegration of all computing facilities –servers, systems and storage – into asingle entity, thus collapsing theconcept of the network. The benefit isthe ability to reduce the demand forcomputing power, storage capacity andinterconnection bandwidth and it istechnologies that organisations likeCisco and IBM have and are developing,that will help deliver this vision.”

Product List

Routing and Switching• Cisco Ethernet and InfiniBand switchmodules for IBM BladeCenter

• Cisco Catalyst® 6500 Series Switches

• Cisco 7600 Series Routers

• Cisco SFS 7000 Series InfiniBandServer Switches

Storage Networking• Cisco MDS 9000 Series

Multilayer SAN Switches

Clustering• IBM System Cluster 1350

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