Eni revealed its new super computer, HPC5, during a ceremony on 6 February. “Today, Eni unveils a supercomputing system with key features which are unique in the industrial world,” said Claudio Descalzi, Eni’s chief executive officer. “This system is able to boost and even further refine the highly complex processes that support Eni’s people in their activities and, therefore, accelerate our digital transformation. This is an important time in the path toward the energy transition. It’s another step forward to the global goal that we share with our research and technology partners: making tomorrow’s energy an even closer reality.”
The new supercomputer supports the previous system (HPC4), tripling its computing power from 18 to 52 petaflops, equivalent to 52 million billion mathematical operations per second, allowing Eni’s supercomputing ecosystem to reach a total peak power of 70 petaflops. The company said HPC5 is the world’s most powerful supercomputer infrastructure in the industrial sector and allows the company to achieve another milestone in its digitalization process.
The remarkable increase in computing power, obtained thanks to the use of hybrid architectures, assists Eni in the achievement of multiple strategic targets: further acceleration of the company’s transformation and the development of new energy sources and related processes, such as the generation of energy from the sea, magnetic confinement fusion, and other climate and environmental technologies developed in collaboration through many partnerships.
HPC5’s capability of processing big data and artificial intelligence systems is expected to further improvement in work processes, with increased process safety, better performances, better planning of exploration activities, and enhanced precision in reservoir simulations, supporting the company’s professionals in daily activities while speeding up decision-making.
Eni’s Green Data Center, which houses all of the company’s supercomputing systems and data, has been developed to be a cutting-edge technology hub and to achieve world-leading energy efficiency results also thanks to the nearby photovoltaic plant that is partially powering HPC5.