Dell builds the largest industrial supercomputer for Eni.
Eni, an Italian multinational oil and gas company, has announced its intention to update its existing supercomputer system, HPC4, to a new HPC5 machine. HPC4 was first introduced at the opening of Eni’s Green Data Center in January 2018, proudly carrying the title of the world’s most powerful industrial supercomputer.
It is currently used for building 3D seismic images, simulating oil and gas systems, and operating industrial plants. According to Claudio Descalzi, Eni’s CEO, enhancing supercomputer infrastructure and developing proprietary technologies is an important part of Eni's digital transformation process. The new supercomputer system is expected to play a central role both in revolutionizing the company’s own processes and transforming the energy sector overall. In line with Eni’s strategic plans, HPC5 has been designed to further accelerate research into non-fossil energy sources as well as support the exploration, development and monitoring of oil fields.
Like its predecessor HPC4, the new HPC5 supercomputer will be powered by Dell Technologies and made up of Dell EMC's PowerEdge series servers.
Compared to the HPC4, the new machine’s computing power has almost tripled from 18 to 52 Pflops. Given that the old machine will also continue to operate, the total peak performance of the two will reach 70 Pflops, making Eni the owner of the world’s most powerful industrial-grade HPC system.
The HPC5 system will consist of 1820 Dell EMC PowerEdge C4140 servers, each with two Intel Xeon Gold 6252 24-core processors and four NVIDIA V100 GPU accelerators. An InfiniBand Mellanox HDR network with a full non-blocking typology will be used as an interconnect. Operating at a speed of 200 Gbit/s, it will provide efficient connection among the servers. The HPC5’s storage system’s volume will reach 15 Petabytes with a combined performance of 200 GB/s.
With its performance and functionality, HPC5 is expected to overtake the current leader in the industry - Total's Pangea III supercomputer with a peak power of 31.7 Pflops - bringing Eni to the top positions in the energy sector.
