During the first week of April, Eni fired up its new HPC cluster in the Green Data Center in Ferrera Erbognone, Italy. Known as HPC3, the new 5.8 Petaflop cluster will allow Eni to fully support all the activities in the Energy Exploration and Production sector.
The start-up of the new HPC3 supercomputer and its follow-on HPC4 will enable Eni to deploy the most advanced and sophisticated proprietary codes developed by our research for the E&P activities,” said Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi. “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.”
The new cluster continues along the Eni’s HPC philosophy based on hybrid architectures, by using top end GP-GPUs as computational accelerators. Driven by internal Eni’s research activity, the cluster design targets both the most efficient energy solution and the delivery of the maximum computational power required by the most advanced proprietary algorithms. HPC3 records a remarkable energy efficiency consumption of 3.66 Gigaflops/Watt; moreover, overall efficiency is also maximized by the direct free-cooling solution provided by the hosting Eni Green Data Center.
HPC3 is an intermediate step towards the next machine, the HPC4, expected at the beginning of 2018. With HPC4, Eni’s target is to exceed 10 Petaflops of computing power.
