Italian major Eni launched its new HPC5 supercomputer on Thursday - the world's most powerful in the industrial sector - hailing the system as further progress towards clean energy, the company said in a statement.
“Today Eni unveils a supercomputing system with key features which are unique in the industrial world. This system is able to ...accelerate our digital transformation. This is an important time in the path toward the energy transition," said ENI's chief executive Claudio Descalzi.
"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,” Descalzi added.
Descalzi attended HPC5's inauguration near the northern city of Pavia together with ENI's president Emma Marcegaglia and research and scientific innovation partners - among them Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, Italy's National Research Council (CNR), Dell Technologies, Intel and Nvidia.
The new supercomputer triples the previous system's computing power from 18 to 52 PetaFlop/s, equivalent to 52 million billion mathematical operations per second, allowing Eni’s supercomputing ecosystem to reach a total peak power of 70 PetaFlop/s.
The remarkable increase in computing power, obtained thanks to the use of hybrid architectures, also helps speed up the development of new energy sources and processes such as generating energy from the sea and magnetic confinement fusion, according to the statement.
HPC5's capacities will also boost climate and environmental technologies developed in collaboration with Eni's prestigious partnerships formed with numerous research centres, the statement said.
HPC5’s ability to process big data and Artificial Intelligence systems will lead to increased process safety, better performance, planning of exploration activities, greater precision in reservoir simulations, speeding up decision-making, said the statement.
The supercomputer was launched at Eni’s Green Data Center in Ferrera Erbognone in the province of Pavia - a cutting-edge technology hub that holds all of the company’s supercomputing systems and data.
