Italian Institute of Technology charges data

The Italian Institute of Technology has strengthened the huge amount of data produced by its research activities: in cooperation with IBM and E4 Computer Engineering, it has doubled its management and storage capacity and quadrupled its digital infrastructure, which is now capable of storing up to 10 million gigabytes. The Franklin supercomputer, designed and built by E4, has also received an upgrade: it is now capable of performing more than two million billion operations per second. This improvement will accelerate 300 active research projects, thanks to supercomputing and artificial intelligence, and contribute to the country’s digital transformation.

Today’s experimental activities produce huge amounts of data, which must, when possible, be made available to the entire scientific community and reusable at any time, while respecting high-level transparency and security requirements. For this reason, the institute wanted to provide itself with an advanced storage system, which divides the data on devices distributed in 14 facilities throughout the national territory. This infrastructure will not only support all areas of research, from robotics to materials science, but will also provide the possibility to collect, classify and track every piece of data for future use, thus representing a unique and transversal asset of the research system from Italy.

“The Institute is making a leap forward in the management of digital data, which represents one of the most important elements in scientific production activity,” says Stefano Pinsetti, Director of ICT at IIT. “Among the goals there is a push in data management in the logic of open science, and the expanded use of artificial intelligence algorithms in data analysis – concludes Pinsetti – which will lead to developments in the way some research is carried out.”