At the beginning of 2017 INAF (Italian National Institute of Astrophysics) sealed an agreement with CINECA (National Supercomputing Center). This was driven by two main needs: to meet, in a quick and flexible way, the increasing request of computing resources from the theoretical community, on a scale that could not be achieved by small, “private” computer clusters in local INAF institutes, providing specialised, high-level  technical support; and, on the other side,to encourage and foster the development of data reduction pipelines requiring HPC resources, as well as big data analysis, in the perspective of observational projects as SKA, EUCLID, LOFAR, and so on, involving huge data streams.

The agreement established that for a two year period the INAF researchers had reserved a certain amount of computational time on Cineca machines. A management committee, composed by INAF researchers and CINECA personnel, was appointed in order to allocate resources, on the basis of competitive  calls, and to monitor the proper usage of the allocated computing time. More over, a  fellowship was funded  to hire a dedicated reference person, collaborating with INAF researchers to tackle problems of porting code to new architectures, to improve their efficiency and, more generally, to trouble shoot nontrivial  technical issues with effective use of CINECA machines and/or their scheduling system.

In this volume (Vol.1) are collected  the reports of all the projects approved in the four calls already concluded