Leonardo: Atos will be its technological partner in the development of the Genoa supercomputer

Rome  14 July 2020 12:35

  • Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, will support the development of the powerful infrastructure intended for the Ligurian headquarters of Leonardo Labs, Leonardo’s new corporate research and development laboratories which are dedicated to innovation in traditional sectors and the development of new technologies  
  • Alessandro Profumo, Chief Executive Officer of Leonardo: “the supercomputer that we are developing in Genoa will significantly strengthen the capabilities both of the Company and on a national scale in supercomputing, Big Data, and autonomous and intelligent systems”
  • The computer centre will be one of the first in Europe, and the first in Italy, to be equipped with the latest generation accelerators, developing a total computing power of over five million billion floating point operations per second


Leonardo has chosen Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, as the technological partner for the development of the supercomputer which will be installed in Genoa, in one of the six Italian Leonardo Labs, the Group’s new laboratories which are dedicated to advanced research and technological innovation.

“The supercomputer that we are developing in Genoa will significantly strengthen both the Company’s capabilities and on a national scale in supercomputing, Big Data, and autonomous and intelligent systems” states Alessandro Profumo, Chief Executive Officer of Leonardo. “This project will contribute significantly to the positioning of Italy among the top five nations in the world of computing capabilities in the sectors of public and industrial research.”

The new computer centre, integrated by Atos, will be one of the first in Europe, and the first in Italy, to be equipped with the latest generation NVidia A100 accelerators. The supercomputer will count on a battery of over one hundred supercomputing units, for a total computing power greater than 5PFlops (5 million billion floating point operations per second), connected by a high-performance network and a storage system equipped with the latest hardware and software technologies, for a storage capacity of the order of 20Pbytes (20 million Gigabytes). Leonardo and Atos will also be able to collaborate on further research projects related to quantum computing.

Leonardo’s supercomputer, developed together with Atos, will be the nerve centre of the Genoese headquarters of Leonardo Labs, the new corporate research and development laboratories dedicated to innovation in Leonardo’s traditional sectors and to the development of new technologies in the longer term. The Labs are being built in the proximity of Leonardo’s main industrial sites in Italy and abroad with the aim of facilitating technology transfer and maximising the benefits for the surrounding territories, and strengthening collaboration with local institutions.

Leonardo has recently launched its international recruitment call for 68 young, talented people for Leonardo Labs that will join six specific research areas (Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Intelligent System, Big Data Analytics, High Performance Computing, Electrification of Aeronautical Platforms, Materials and Structures and Quantum Technologies) and which will be part of the teams that are being set up in the six Labs sites, present, in addition to Genoa, and in the areas of Milan, Turin, Rome, Naples and Taranto.

The new laboratories will also allow a continuous flow of talent to ensure flexibility and renewal, both of skills and professional abilities, on the basis of an internationally adopted model by which young international external researchers will work together with experts and researchers across Leonardo’s Divisions.