Summary

• Europe's largest digital library service for data coming from numerical simulations and experiments in the field of fluid dynamics (400 TB accessible online)
• most efficient and effective transnational access to outstanding experimental and numerical data
• broadest variety of advanced tools for exploring and analyzing data on our high performance computing facilities (26.6 TFlops)
• high quality technical and scientific user support

CINECA will represent one of the world's largest data bases at the disposal of the European turbulence community, easily accessible through communication networks. Its data storage and computational resources will be further enhanced due to the participation in several EU-funded activities like DEISA, PRACE and HPC Europa.

CINECA, is the largest supercomputing centre in Italy for public and private research activities and one of the largest in the world (ranking 48th in the last Top500 List - http://www.top500.org). Its statutory aims comprise the promotion of the use of the most advanced computer based information processing systems to support public and private scientific and technological research. The present CINECA main HPC platforms are represented by a 5000 processors AMD Opteron based Linux cluster (peak performance 26.6 TFlops) and a 512 processors IBM Power5 processors based architecture (peak performance 3.9 TFlops). A number of data storage facilities are available. A high performance GPFS 20 TB area, to temporary save data during runs. Final data can be stored and managed on a permanent disk area of about 400 TB (progressively increasing in size, presently SFS technology based) and, finally, on a tertiary cartridge based storage (StorageTek technology). All data is constantly on-line and accessible. Complementary computing systems supports data analysis exploration and advanced visualization, thanks also to several VR facilities. CINECA is part of the core sites of the DEISA European Distributed Supercomputing infrastructure and it is committed to its development, improvement and deployment to the scientific community. It is also the leader of the FP6 funded HPC-Europa project, an I3 action with the main objective of supporting researchers mobility across Europe. CINECA offers skills and advanced expertise in various fields of science and technology, from code development, parallelization, optimization, to visualization and data management, to web applications and services, to, finally, experimentation and exploitation of innovative high-end technologies.