A date to remember
June 11, 2026 marks an important milestone for high-performance computing in Italy. At the DAMA Tecnopolo in Bologna, the National Centre ICSC — an IT4LIA partner — has officially switched on five new systems that further strengthen an infrastructure already among the most advanced in Europe: LISA, MARCO POLO, GAIA, NOX and SOL.
The event, titled “From PNRR to the Future: A National Research and Innovation Infrastructure for Real Impact“, was attended by the Minister of Universities and Research Anna Maria Bernini, the Director General of DG Connect at the European Commission Roberto Viola, and the President of the Emilia-Romagna Region Michele de Pascale.
More than hardware: a strategic platform for the country
This is about much more than new hardware. With the inauguration of these systems — built thanks to PNRR investments from the Ministry of Universities and Research with a total budget of over 86 million euros — Italy completes its first national distributed platform integrating HPC, Cloud and Quantum Computing. An ecosystem designed to strengthen the country’s digital sovereignty, attract international talent, and support the competitiveness of research and industry across fields ranging from precision medicine to the energy transition, from astrophysics to cybersecurity.
Five systems, five vocations
Each of the new systems brings something distinct to the table.
- LISA is the new engine for artificial intelligence: developed as an upgrade to the Leonardo supercomputer and co-funded by EuroHPC JU, it is designed to train next-generation models — from Large Language Models to multimodal AI — and has pushed Leonardo to tenth place in the global TOP500 ranking.
- GAIA addresses cloud HPC: a flexible infrastructure built to manage large volumes of data, including sensitive data, and to make AI accessible to research institutions, businesses and public administration.
- MARCO POLO is oriented towards mission-critical applications — operational weather forecasting, astrophysics, large-scale research — and was developed through a collaboration involving INAF, the ItaliaMeteo Agency, the University of Bologna, and other institutions.
- Finally, NOX and SOL pave the way for quantum computing: two systems based on different technologies — superconducting for the former, neutral atoms for the latter — designed to work in synergy with existing HPC systems and open new frontiers for scientific research and industrial applications.
LISA and GAIA: the computational backbone of IT4LIA
For IT4LIA, this inauguration carries particular significance. LISA and GAIA are already an integral part of the AI Factory’s computing infrastructure: together with Leonardo and MEGARIDE, they form an ensemble of over 20,000 GPUs on which the project’s partners are today developing AI models and applications.
LISA provides the computational power needed to train the most demanding models; GAIA offers the flexible cloud environment for managing data, experimenting, and deploying solutions — with a large-scale data lake, interactive notebook environments, and tools for automating data science workflows. Together, the two systems form a compute continuum capable of responding in an integrated way to a wide range of needs: from initial data exploration all the way to training large foundation models.
Soon, this infrastructure will be joined by the new IT4LIA supercomputer, whose contract was signed in April 2026 by EuroHPC JU with E4 Computer Engineering and Dell Technologies. With a peak performance of over 160 Exaflops for AI inference and a liquid-cooled architecture based on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, it will rank among the most advanced infrastructures in Europe — delivering a further leap in the computational capabilities available to researchers, startups, SMEs and public administration through IT4LIA.
Accessing supercomputing through IT4LIA
It is precisely thanks to this infrastructure that IT4LIA is able to offer access to supercomputing resources to businesses, researchers and public administration. The available packages are designed to support organisations at different stages of their AI journey: from first tests on AI workloads to the development of foundation models and agentic AI solutions. Access to computing resources always comes alongside specialist support, data related services and tailored training programmes to help organisations build AI expertise in-house. Rounding out the offer, horizontal services guide users through the entire AI project lifecycle: from AI setup and model development, through to testing and regulatory compliance with AI trust services. IT4LIA’s offering is open to all sectors, with dedicated vertical expertise in four strategic domains: Agritech & Agrifood, Cybersecurity, Earth and Manufacturing.
Looking ahead
The expansion of the ICSC ecosystem represents a concrete strengthening of the foundations on which IT4LIA continues to grow. The systems inaugurated today consolidate a platform that is already fully operational and capable of delivering the computing power, flexibility and expertise that Italian and European innovation needs — as we look ahead to the new IT4LIA supercomputer, which will take this infrastructure to an even higher level.
