Claudio Descalzi, CEO of Eni: "Reached another milestone in the company's digitalisation process"
Eni has started the construction of the new HPC5 supercomputing system in order to upgrade and update the current HPC4, tripling the computing power that will go from 18 to 52 PetaFlop / s, ie 52 millions of billions of mathematical operations performed in a second. Thanks to the contribution of the technology of Dell Technologies, HPC5, hosted within Eni's Green Data Center, will have 2020 as the start of the total peak power of 70 PetaFlop / s, becoming the supercomputing infrastructure dedicated to supporting most powerful industrial activities in the world.
The architecture of the new HPC5 supercomputer was conceived with the same philosophy as the previous ones, based on hybrid cluster technology (CPU, Central Processing Unit + GPU, Graphics Processing Unit), an accelerated architecture inaugurated by Eni in 2013 with application in the sector industrial of O&G and today recognized as a winner and widely distributed in the most important world computing centers. HPC5 will be provided by Dell Technologies and consists of 1820 Dell EMC PowerEdge C4140 nodes, each equipped with 2 Intel Gold 6252 24-core processors and 4 NVIDIA V100 GPU accelerators. The nodes are connected to each other through a very high performance InfiniBand Mellanox HDR 200 Gbit / s network according to a full-non-blocking topology that guarantees efficient and direct interconnection of each node. The HPC5 system is flanked by a high performance 15 PetaBytes storage system (200 GByte / s of aggregate read / write bandwidth).
Eni continues to chart a strategic path in which the new supercomputing system, in addition to being crucial in the digital transformation process along the entire value chain of the corporate energy supply chain, represents a fundamental tool for achieving Eni's "vision" on the energy of the future. HPC5 allows the use of "big data" generated in the operation phase by all production assets, and allows printing
further acceleration in the research and development of non-fossil energy sources, as well as supporting all phases of exploration, development and monitoring of the deposits.
In line with the continuous commitment to sustainability, HPC5 has been developed in order to obtain the maximum level of energy efficiency by exploiting the energy produced by the photovoltaic field installed at the Green Data Center, so as to reduce emissions and operating costs.
Eni's Chief Executive Officer, Claudio Descalzi, commented: “The investments dedicated to the enhancement of the supercomputing infrastructure and the development of proprietary technologies are a fundamental pillar of the company's digital transformation process. The availability of great computing powers and sophisticated proprietary algorithms allow us to excel in the current scenario of the energy sector and to project ourselves into the future. A future that we are outlining with the numerous projects started in the field of alternative energy and with the important Eni investment plan in Research and Development. With HPC5 we are on the road to using exascale class supercomputers in the energy world, systems that will revolutionize processes in the future of the company ".
The Eni Green Data Center, inaugurated in 2013, was one of the first in Europe by type of energy efficiency and size and with the installation of HPC5 maintains the excellence that characterizes the technological infrastructure of the company.