Eni S.p.A. (Rome, Italy; www.eni.com) has started the updating work for its new supercomputer system, HPC5, in order to strengthen the existing HPC4 system, tripling its computing power from 18 to 52 petaflops (floating point operations per second), equivalent to 52 million billion mathematical operations per second. Thanks to the updates to HPC5, powered by Dell Technologies, Eni's Green Data Center will become the world's most powerful supercomputer infrastructure in the industrial sphere, with a total peak power of 70 petaflops.
The new HPC5 supercomputer has been designed according to the same philosophy as its predecessors, based on hybrid cluster technology (Central Processing Unit or CPU and Graphics Processing Unit or GPU). Eni has introduced this accelerated architecture to the industry in 2013 and is now recognized as a benchmark and widespread in the world's biggest computing centers. HPC5 will be provided by Dell Technologies and made up of 1,820 Dell EMC PowerEdge C4140 servers, each with two Intel Gold 6252 24-core processors and four NVIDIA V100 GPU accelerators. The servers will be connected through an InfiniBand Mellanox HDR ultra-high-performance network with a speed of 200 Gbit/s and a full non-blocking topology that ensures efficient and direct connection among every server. HPC5 comes with a high-performance 15-petabyte storage system (200 GB/s aggregate read/write speeds).
Eni continues to draw a strategic path on which the new supercomputer system will be crucial both to digital transformation throughout the energy value chain and to Eni's vision for energy in the future. HPC5 allows the use of the "big data" generated during the operations phase by all of the production assets, and will further accelerate R&D into non-fossil energy sources, as well as supporting exploration, development and monitoring of oil fields during all stages
In line with Eni's commitment to sustainability, HPC5 has been designed to be as energy-efficient as possible, using energy produced by the solar plant at the Green Data Center to reduce emissions and running costs.
Claudio Descalzi, CEO of Eni, commented: "Our investment to strengthen our supercomputer infrastructure and to develop proprietary technologies are a crucial part of the digital transformation of Eni. Having great computing power and sophisticated algorithms at our disposal makes us leaders in the modern energy sector and projects us on to the future. Eni is forging that future through a range of alternative energy projects, and through a solid R&D investment plan. With HPC5, we are entering the world of exascale computing in the energy sector, which will revolutionise company processes in the future."
Eni's Green Data Center opened in 2013 and was one of the first facilities of its kind and size in Europe.