Local authorities and health authorities in Emilia-Romagna will also be able to count on a supercomputer

Its name is MarghERita, and it is a cutting-edge computing infrastructure capable of processing large quantities of data. Thanks to the Big Data Platform project, entities will be able to count on a 3.5 million euros regional supercomputer. Possible areas to work on: environmental risk management, epidemiological surveillance, prevention of road accidents, reduction of pollution. The notice will remain active until December 31, 2024.

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Local authorities and health authorities in Emilia-Romagna will also be able to count on a supercomputer.
A big amount of data needs huge computing resources in order to be collected, integrated and read. But not every public authority can afford the great investments needed for vanguard infrastructures.

This is the reason why Regione Emilia-Romagna has decided to take charge of such machinery, a supercomputer -MarghERita- equipped with 150 microprocessors, projected to help every local administration to freely use the potential of new technologies.
Besides the great supercomputers of the Emilia-Romagna region, such as Leonardo or ECMWF, the Regional Administration has decided to invest 3,5 million euros into the Big Data Platform project, realized with the technical support of the in-house agency Lepida S.c.p.A and involving Fondazione Big Data (iFAB).
The objective is to make MarghERita available for every public administration of Emilia-Romagna to integrate and manage a big amount of data from different sources and to make different Public Administration work together: Municipalities, Unions of Municipalities, Provinces, healthcare agencies, universities, agencies, public services societies and other National Institutions.

The project was financed with Cohesion and Development Plan. This choice is not random, since these are loans designed to fight against territorial disparities and the project will share a highly performant computer directly with the territories to support them to the best (especially internal, rural and mountain areas).
The note will remain active until December 31, 2024. Candidates will be able to present their project proposals.
“With this project we want to share with the public administrations of our Region an extremely sophisticated, modern and trustworthy tool for data management – says Paola Salomoni, regional councilor for Agenda Digitale. These information today are an important asset that could improve the territorial management and simplify the life of citizens, if well exploited. This is a new fundamental step to implement the objectives of the regional Agenda Digitale, which aims to excel and to leave no one behind.”

What MarghERita can do
Regione Emilia-Romagna suggests that there are four main but not exclusive topics where MarghERita's power can make the difference: management of environmental risk, epidemiologic surveillance, prevention of car accidents, reduction of pollution.
These are topics that need a big amount of information to be collected and classified in order to reach efficient government choices, develop new services and improve the ones that already exist. Think, just to give some examples, of the monitoring of fine particles, of the measures to prevent hydrogeological instability, of traffic indicators, of the mapping of the territory or of the forecast of tourist flows on the Romagna coast.
Every Body will be able to count on the support of the Region to collect and manage this enormous quantity of data. The applications that require large computing capacities are virtually infinite, if we keep in mind that the peculiarity of these systems is the integration of different sources to suggest correlations (those, for example, between certain pathologies and the environmental conditions of a neighborhood), propose solutions (for example, identifying the busiest roads and routes in certain circumstances), efficiently modify models and simulations (updating the costs of raw materials and energy expected for a project in real time).