Yesterday, Wednesday 8 October, in the magnificent natural setting of the island of Elba, the Annual Meeting of the ICSC – National Research Centre for HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing, which is celebrating its third year of activity this year, came to an end. The event represented a fundamental opportunity for discussion for the community that contributed to the establishment of the ICSC in 2022 and is preparing to conclude the current project phase, financed with funds from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), at the end of 2025. It was an opportunity to present the results of the work carried out over the last few years and to define the strategic lines aimed at ensuring a sustainable future for the National Centre.
The programme
The event programme featured discussions and debates between representatives from 37 public bodies, universities and research centres, and the 14 companies that make up the ICSC Foundation, the body responsible for managing the National Centre. They focused on the progress made on best practices established over the last three years thanks to the public-private collaborative approach on which the entire ICSC activity is based.
The results
This combination of public and private expertise has enabled important milestones to be achieved within the timeframes set by the PNRR. Among the results achieved, it is certainly worth mentioning the construction, now almost complete, of the Italian Supercomputing Cloud infrastructure, one of the main objectives of the ICSC, and the national aggregation of research communities engaged in the development and application of innovative numerical simulation and high-performance data analysis tools and solutions in scientific domains of strategic importance for the country, such as physics, earth, climate and environmental sciences, medicine and materials science, to name but a few.
It is precisely the collaborative model adopted by the ICSC, which aims to build bridges not only between skills but also between scientific research, the productive sector and public administration, that has ensured an increase in the technological maturity of innovative hardware and software solutions for data management and analysis, including applications based on machine learning, artificial intelligence and quantum computing, which will guarantee a competitive advantage for the entire country.
The value of the activities promoted and the infrastructure created is also demonstrated by the ICSC’s participation in programmes and initiatives of both continental and global significance. Over the last three years, the National Centre has signed agreements with international partners and now participates in various capacities in strategic projects such as the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), where it is responsible for managing the Italian Node of European resource federations dedicated to scientific data, and IT4LIA AI Factory, where it will coordinate activities aimed at developing and providing data management and training services.
