GAIA - CINECA's Large-Scale HPC Cloud Infrastructure for Scientific and Technological Research

Learn about GAIA, CINECA's large-scale high-performance computing cloud infrastructure designed for scientific and technological research in this 25-minute conference talk. Discover how this major European HPC cloud deployment in Bologna, Italy leverages OpenStack to meet the growing demand for both flexibility and computing power in research environments. Explore the technical specifications of this impressive infrastructure, including 500 interconnected servers with low-latency Ethernet networking, 10PB Ceph storage complemented by a 50PB VAST system, and three GPU types supporting data visualization, rendering, numerical computing, and artificial intelligence workloads. Understand the configuration challenges and operational complexities of managing a cloud infrastructure at this scale, and examine the load testing strategies implemented using Rally, including both standard and customized scenarios designed to assess system resilience and identify resource saturation thresholds under production-like conditions.