On October 9^th, 2019, a selection of students from the “De Giorgi” high school in Lecce visited the Supercomputing Center and the HPC Lab at the Ecotekne Campus, within the scope of a student exchange program the school decided to take part in.

The visit actually involved a small group of 6 both Italian and Dutch students (3 + 3), who had the chance to see the supercomputer and gather information about how it works and what for. The CMCC Supercomputing Center is the only computational facility in Italy specializing in Climate Change research. Housed in the Ecotekne complex (Lecce), the Supercomputing Center provides the technological infrastructure and computational capabilities required to develop simulations and models that are able to provide extremely accurate and detailed results. The main facility of the Supercomputing Center is the Zeus system based on 348 Lenovo SD530 compute nodes with a computing capability of 1.2 PFlops (1.200.000.000.000.000 operations per second).

The students then moved on to the HPC Lab, where they were given presentations illustrating the activities carried out at CMCC and, in particular, focusing on the description of the OFIDIA2 project objectives and how to use the crowdsensing fire prevention App called FireAware. The presentations also gave students the chance to see how a weather station works using the Arduino board, which features an extremely high potential and versatility. They were also shown how to read weather variables, especially temperature and humidity, with the main aim of raising awareness of climate change, environmental issues and related topics.