The world’s most powerful industrial supercomputer is now in operation.
Eni, the Italian energy company headquartered in Milan, today announced the supercomputer named HPC5, a GPU-accelerated system capable of performing 52 million billion operations per second, is now in use.
HPC5 will help Eni accelerate research and development of clean energy sources, as well as supporting exploration and the monitoring of oil fields.
Equipped with 1820 Dell EMC servers, each with four NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs, interconnected via Mellanox’s InfiniBand, the system is designed for the most efficient server and data storage connection.
In total, the system is comprised of 7,280 NVIDIA V100 GPUs.
The supercomputer is the first of its kind in the oil and gas industry, and when compared to the current Top 500 supercomputers list, would rank as the fifth most powerful in the world.
“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,” said Claudio Descalzi, CEO, Eni.“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,” said Claudio Descalzi, CEO, Eni.
Eni says they plan to use the system to accelerate seismic workloads, to run ECHELON, the company’s GPU-based reservoir simulator, as well as to develop new AI-based approaches to energy discovery and processing.
The system was designed and constructed by Dell.