Pythagoras, the Italian supercomputer that accelerates the race for fusion energy

It is called Pythagoras and represents one of the most ambitious technological challenges of contemporary Europe: a supercomputer dedicated entirely to nuclear fusion energy research the “Holy Grail” of the energy transition. It was inaugurated at the Cineca in Casalecchio di Reno, in the presence of ministers Anna Maria Bernini and Gilberto Pichetto Fratin.

Financed by the European consortium EUROfusion and managed by Cineca in collaboration with Enea, Pitagora is a machine with 27 million billion operations per second (27 PFlop/s), capable of entering the World top 50 most powerful supercomputers.

It is designed to simulate plasma physics and analyze advanced materials useful for the development of fusion reactors, fundamental activities for the validation of the data collected by ITER, the great international experiment underway in France, and for the design of the future DEMO power plant.

A virtual laboratory for the energy of the future

Behind the power of Pythagoras lies a scientific mission of historic importance: to make fusion nuclear a stable energy sourceclean and practically unlimited. Unlike fission, fusion does not produce long-lived radioactive waste and poses no risk of catastrophic accidents.

Italian technology and sustainability

The supercomputer was built by Lenovo, which provided the computing architecture based on over 1,000 servers and 670 NVIDIA H100 GPUs connected via an InfiniBand NDR network, for a total of 260,000 cores and a storage capacity of 20 petabytes.

Lenovo Neptune direct liquid cooling technology dissipates up to 97% of the heat produced, ensuring an operating efficiency (PUE) of approximately 1.1, among the highest in the world.

“Pythagoras is not just a technological milestonebut a symbol of Lenovo’s commitment to supporting scientific research”, commented Alessandro De Bartolo, Infrastructure Solutions Group Leader of Lenovo Italy. “HPC is the key tool for tackling the great scientific challenges of our time.”

Cineca, the heart of European supercomputing

Cineca – an inter-university consortium that brings together 70 universities, two ministries and dozens of research bodies – is one of the main supercomputing centers in the world. Since 2016 it has hosted the infrastructures dedicated to the EUROfusion scientific community, including Marconi-Fusion, predecessor of Pitagora.

“With this project, Italy consolidates its leadership in fusion energy research,” declared Francesco Ubertini, president of Cineca. “It is a decisive step towards construction of an industrial fusion power plantand demonstrates how collaboration between public institutions, research bodies and industry can produce concrete results.”

Even the president of Enea, Francesca Mariotti, defined Pitagora as “an accelerator of progress” that integrates Italian skills and infrastructures at the service of sustainability and competitiveness.

A step forward in the race for fusion

Pythagoras represents, for Italy and Europe, a crucial piece in the global fusion racetechnology in which the United States, United Kingdom and Japan are investing.

The shared goal is to arrive, by the middle of the century, at a commercial reactor model capable of producing reliable and competitive zero-emission electricity.

To achieve this, numerical simulation and supercomputing are indispensable tools: model extreme conditions inside a fusion reactor – where the plasma reaches temperatures above 100 million degrees – requires computing power that only systems like Pitagora can guarantee.

With its 27 PFlop/s of power and 1.3 exaflops of AI capacity, the Bolognese supercomputer is a candidate to be one of the strategic hubs for European energy science.