HPC Onboarding Kit:
Getting Started with AI on Europe’s Supercomputers

Artificial intelligence increasingly depends on massive computational power — far beyond what a single workstation or cloud instance can deliver. To help startups, SMEs, and innovators harness this power, the HPC Onboarding Kit introduces you to Europe’s public supercomputing infrastructure and guides you through every step of getting started.

This kit focuses on Leonardo, the EuroHPC pre-exascale supercomputer hosted by CINECA in Italy, and shows how to use it effectively for AI and data-driven workloads. By following the short videos and written guides, you’ll learn how to gain access, log in, and run your first experiments on one of Europe’s fastest machines.

What You’ll Learn

• What is HPC
  Understand what High-Performance Computing (HPC) is, how it works, and why it enables large-scale AI training and data analysis. 
• EuroHPC JU AI Compute Tracks
  Learn about the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking’s access tracks — from Playground and Fast Lane to Large Scale Access — and how to apply for free compute resources through the AI Factories. 
• Account on Leonardo
  See how to create a CINECA UserDB account, link it to a project, and activate two-factor authentication (2FA) for secure access. 
• Login to Leonardo
  Step through the installation of the Step client, certificate setup, and SSH configuration to log in safely to the Leonardo system. 
• First Steps on Leonardo
  Get familiar with Leonardo’s architecture, file systems, and job scheduling with SLURM — including a practical example of how to run your own job script. 
• Software on Leonardo
  Discover how to use the module system, conda environments, and containers to set up your software stack for AI workloads. 

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Why This Matters

This onboarding kit is designed to help small and medium-sized enterprises take advantage of Europe’s shared HPC infrastructure — lowering the entry barrier to advanced computing and empowering innovation. Whether you’re prototyping AI models, taking your first steps in fine-tuning existing models, or just experimenting with available resources, the EuroHPC systems provide the compute capacity to turn ideas into impact.

By the end of this series, you’ll know how to go from zero to confidently running real AI training jobs on Leonardo.