Italian oil company Eni has fired up its new HPC3 supercomputer at the Green Data center in Ferrera Erbognone intended to support all the company’s activities in the Exploration & Production sector.
Eni said on Monday that the high-performance computing HPC3 together with the co-existing HPC2 system, would provide Eni with a sustained 5.8 petaflops, and 8.4 petaflops of peak computing capacity.
For those unfamiliar with such specs, a petaflop is a unit of computing speed equal to one thousand million million (ten to the 15th power) floating-point operations per second.
The new cluster continues along the Eni’s HPC philosophy based on hybrid architectures, by using top end GP-GPUs as computational accelerators.
HPC3 records energy efficiency consumption of 3.66 gigaflops/Watt while overall efficiency is additionally maximized by the direct free cooling solution provided by the hosting Eni Green Data center.
Green Data houses all of Eni’s computer systems for information technology management and the processing facilities as well as the HPC supercomputers used to process seismic data and simulate oil and gas reserves.
HPC3 is an intermediate step towards the next evolution, the HPC4, expected at the beginning of 2018. With HPC4 Eni’s target is to overcome the barrier of 10 petaflops of computing power.
Eni CEO, Claudio Descalzi , said: “The start-up of the new HPC3 supercomputer and the next comer, HPC4, will enable Eni to deploy the most advanced and sophisticated proprietary codes developed by our research for E&P activities.
“These technologies will provide Eni with unprecedented accuracy and resolution in seismic imaging, geological modeling and reservoir dynamic simulation, allowing us to further accelerate overall cycle times in the upstream process and to sustain the E&P performances.”