The impacts of High Performance Computing (HPC) and its central importance in positioning Emilia Romagna as a Hub of reference in Europe for Big Data research and development

One of the key technological challenges in establishing geopolitical supremacy is possessing greater computational capability. This will be increasingly true once again in the post-COVID-19 future in which economies will have shifted towards greater digitalization than in the past.

Future societies must be much more attentive to the health of their people and protecting the environment. The public will request services that are increasingly personalized and this will require international networks for gathering, analyzing and controlling the data that will continue to be generated at a level of growth that is exponential and unstoppable.

Within this context, the primary technological frontier of computational capability is High Performance Computing (HPC), that is, what is obtained when a series of high-level, high-power servers, interconnected with each other to form a single system, is used to solve complex problems quickly through parallel calculation methods.

Emilia Romagna has, today, the opportunity to capitalize on the region’s growing technological and digital expertise by creating synergies with the competencies developed in the region’s areas of specialization. This would create an attractive ecosystem that could compete on an international level and attract talent, capital and businesses, and would act as a driver to position Italy as a reference hub in Europe and the world for the development and use of state-of-the-art computational technologies.