Ricerc@Sapienza

We propose to acquire a state-of-the-art HPC cluster dedicated to material-design activities of the Condensed Matter Theory sector of the Physics Department.
Thanks to astonishing progress in computational techniques, theoretical condensed matter physics is evolving from material understanding to actual material design. Problems once considered unsolvable, like crystal structure prediction and reaction dynamics, can now be tackled on a computer, providing an invaluable tool to guide experiments. Our project takes full advantage of these techniques, to address different problems (superconductivity, phase-change materials, self-assembly of nano-particles, bioinformatics), reflecting the variety of interests in our sector.

A dependable HPC infrastructure is vital to stay competitive in our field. Many essential activities, i.e. student training, code development, benchmarks, urgent runs, cannot rely exclusively on grants, but require local, free resources. This is recognized by most european universities, where start-up packages for new faculties include access to computational resources.
Unfortunately, this is not the case for Sapienza. In the last five years, following a conspicuous generational turnover, our sector hired eight faculties, coming mostly from foreign institutions, who are internationally recognized experts in the development and application of advanced numerical methods to CMP problems. Their skills nicely complement the existing expertise of a very vital area of our department. However, most of these researchers do not have access to local resources provided by Sapienza or INFN HPC services, and the only cluster in the Physics Department, financed by a previous Ateneo call, is heavily geared towards machine learning applications.
Our configuration is tailored to the needs of our sector and guided by four principles: 1) Maximum CPU power; 2) Maximal flexibility; 3) Expandability; 4) Integrability into Sapienzas future cloud computing initiative.