IFAB is an integral part of Italy’s Data Valley, currently represented by the Technopole Data Manufacturing – DAMA, located in Bologna. The Technopole is the epicenter of Italian excellence in Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, as well as a strategic node in the European supercomputing network – EuroHPC thanks to the presence of some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
By bringing together computing infrastructures, databases, and scientific research institutions, the Technopole stands at the forefront of data-driven innovation, with applications spanning both scientific and industrial realms—from meteorology to medicine, from earth sciences to manufacturing.
DAMA represents the largest infrastructural investment in Italy dedicated to Big Data and supercomputing, as well as the most significant achievement of the Emilia-Romagna Region’s innovation policies. It aligns infrastructures and expertise with the goal of building the economy of the future, guided by a vision that emphasizes not only profitability but also community well-being.
The new Technopole rises on the grounds of Bologna’s former tobacco factory, an area of about 140,000 square meters designed in 1952 by Pier Luigi Nervi—one of the most noteworthy examples of 20th-century industrial architecture. In addition to hosting high-performance computing infrastructures, the project will welcome both public and private entities that use and develop HPC (High Performance Computing) technologies.
Among the supercomputers currently operating within the Technopole is Leonardo, a pre-exascale system with a processing power of 240 PetaFLOPS (equal to 240 million billion operations per second), ranking it among the four most powerful supercomputers worldwide.