The INFN theoretical community is active in several scientific areas that require significant computational support. These areas stretch over a wide spectrum, requiring in some cases fairly limited computing resources - for instance in nuclear physics, high-energy physics phenomenology, spin-system simulations - while, at the other end of the spectrum huge computing power, that can only be provided at the transnational level, is needed; examples in this class are LQCD, dynamical systems and classical and ab initio simulations of bio-systems.
At the same time, for most groups active in these areas, it is becoming more and more difficult to develop their computational strategies and algorithms in a way that allows to adapt to the increasingly fast changes happening in high performance computing architectures.  
Last but not least, several existing INFN projects have produced significant progress on technological developments that may be crucial building blocks for new generation HPC systems, if it can be shown that they are efficient solutions to (at least some) large scale computational problems.
SUMA plans to support all these physics goals, and at the same time aims to explore all suitable ways in which the technological developments made at INFN can be put to good use for the present and future needs of computational physics.