 Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm talking next with Sancio Basini, the head of high performance computing at Seneca, a Dell Technologies customer. Sancio, welcome to the CUBE. Thank you, it's a pleasure. Likewise, nice to see you. So tell us a little bit about Seneca. This is a large computing center, but a very large Italian nonprofit consortium. Tell us about it. Yes, Seneca has been founded 50 years ago from the university systems in Italy who support the scientific discovery and the industry innovations losing the high performance computing and the correlated methodologies like intelligence, together with the big data processes and simulations. We are a consortium, which means that is private, not for profit organizations. Currently, I'm member of the consortium, almost all the universities in Italy and also all the national agencies. And I also read that you are the top 10 out of the top 500 of the world's fastest supercomputers. That's a pretty big accomplishment. Yes, that is a part of our statutory missions. In the last 10 to 15 years, we have been to say frequent buyers in the top 10. The idea is to enabling the scientific discovery by means of providing the most advanced systems and the good design in the most advanced HPC systems to promote and to support the excellence in science and being part of the European high performance computing ecosystems. Now talk to me about some of the challenges that Seneca is trying to solve, in particular the human brain project. Talk to us a little bit about that and how you're leveraging high performance computing to accelerate scientific discovery. The human brain project is one of the flagship project that has been co-funded by the European Commission and the participating member states. There are two different, right now, flagships together with another that is just in progress, which is the quantum flagship. We are participating indirectly together with the National Research Council and we are core partners of the HPC structures that is the human brain project. One billion euro of investment co-funded by the participating states and the European Commission. It's a project that would combine both the technology issues and the designing of high performance computing systems that would meet the requirements of the community and the big scientific challenges correlated to the physiological functions of the human brains, including different functions related to the behavior of the human brain, either from the pathological point of view, either from the physiological point of view, in order to better understand the aging and idealism that would impact the health of the public health systems, some other that are correlated with what will be the support for the physiological knowledge of the human brains. And finally, computational performance, the human brain is more than exascale systems, but with energy consumption, which is very low. I mean, we're talking about some hundreds of watts of energy would provide an extreme computational performance. So if we could organize the technology of the high performance computing in terms of interconnections, neural morphing computing systems that would represent a tremendous step ahead in order to facing the big challenges of our days, like energies, personalized medicines, climate change, food for all, those kind of big socioeconomical challenge that we are facing. I was reading that besides the human brain project, there are other projects going on such as that you mentioned. I'd like to understand how Seneca is working with Dell Technologies. You have to translate, as you mentioned a minute ago, the scientific requirements for discovery into high performance computing requirements. Talk to me about how you've been doing that with partners like Dell Technologies. In our computing architectures, we had the need to address the capability to facing the big data processing involved with respect of the human brain project and, generally speaking, that involved with respect of the science driven that would provide cloud access to the systems by means of containers, technologies, and the capability also to address what will be the creation of a federations of high performance computing facility in Europe. So, at the end, we manage a competitive dialogue and procurement process that, in a certain sense, would share together with the different potential technology providers what it could be the visions and also the constraints with respect of the visions, including budget constraints. And at the end, Dell that showed the characteristics of the solution that it would be more, let's say compliant and at the same time flexible with respect of the combinations of very different constraints and requirements. Dell Technologies has been, it sounds like a pretty flexible partner because you've got so many different needs and scientific needs to meet for different researchers. Talk to me about how you mentioned that this is a multinational effort. How does Seneca-Sterven work with teams not only in Italy, but in other countries and from other institutes? The Italian commitment together with the European member states is that by means of scientific maps and peer review process, roughly speaking, half of the production capacity would be shared at the European level. That is a commitment that has been shared together with France, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland, where also, of course, Italian scientists can apply and participate, but in a sort of emulation and the advanced competition for addressing what will be the excellence in science. The remaining 50% of our production capacity is for the national community and somehow to prepare to support the Italian community to be competitive on the worldwide scenario. That setting up would lead also to the agreement at the international level with respect of some of the actions that are promoted in progress in the US and in Japan also. There being the sharing of options with the US reserters there or Japanese reserters in an open space. It sounds like the Human Brain Project, which the HPC is powering, which has been around since 2013, is really facilitating global collaboration. Talk to me about some of the results that the high performance computing environment has helped the Human Brain Project to achieve so far. The main outcomes that it will be consolidated in the next phase that will be lead by EuroSPC, which is called the Phoenix, the standard for federation of high performance computing system in Europe that provide open service based on two concepts. One is the sharing of the ID at the European level, so it means that open the access to the Sineca system, to the SEA system in France, to the Eulix system in Germany, to the Fiddyne system in Switzerland, and to the Marinozo system in Spain. That is the federated ID management. The others, it's related to the Sineca system, it's related to what will be the federation of data access in the scientific community, measure their data in a seamless mode. The actions that has been supported by Sineca has to do with two specific target. One is the elaborations of the data that are provided by the Lens, the laser laboratory facility in Florence, that is one of the core parts is covering the data that would come from the mouse brains that are used for caviar. And the second part is for the mesoscale studies of the cortex of the brain in some situations, the combinations of performance capability of the federation systems for addressing what it would be, the simulations of the overall behavior of the human brain that would take a lot of performance, that challenges are periodically, simulations are periodically run and that it would happen combining that the HPC facilities at European level. Right, so I was reading, there's a case study by the way on Sineca that Dell Technologies has published and some of the results you talked about those that the HPC is facilitating research and results on epilepsy, spinal cord injury, brain prosthesis for the blind, as well as new insights into autism. So incredibly important work that you're doing here for the human brain project. One last question, Sancio, for you. What advice would you give to your peers who might be in similar situations that need to build and deploy and maintain high performance computing environments? Where should they start? There is a continuous sharing of knowledge, experience, best practices where the situation is different in the sense that they are focused on what will be the integrations of the high performance computing technology into their production workflow. There is the sharing of the experience in order to provide a spreads and amplifications of the opportunity for supporting innovations that is part of our future missions in Italy but it's also the objective that is supported by the European Commission. Excellent, that sharing and that knowledge transfer and collaboration seems to be absolutely fundamental and the environment that you've built facilitates that. Sancio, thank you so much for sharing with us what Seneca is doing and the great research that's going on there and across a lot of disciplines. We appreciate you joining the program today, thank you. Thank you, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for your opportunity. Likewise, for Sancio Valsini, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE conversation.