Dell Technologies (www.delltechnologies.com) has announced the startup of the world’s most powerful industrial supercomputer, the HPC5, which was powered at Eni S.p.A.’s (Milan, Italy; www.eni.com) Green Data Centre. The drive to create environmentally sound and sustainable futuristic performance brought Dell Technologies and Eni together.
The supercomputing infrastructure fuelled by 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors obtains unprecedented levels of processing for the industrial and oil & gas sector and can perform 52 million billion operations per second.
HPC5 enables the use of big data generated during production and will further accelerate R&D programs for the transition to non-fossil energy sources. It will also support exploration, development and monitoring of oil fields.
In line with Dell Technologies and Eni’s sustainability commitment, HPC5 was designed to operate at the highest possible energy efficiency, using solar power produced at the Green Data Centre to reduce emissions.
The HPC5 system uses an advanced parallel architecture and supports a hybrid programming model, which enables Eni to process seismic images faster and use much more sophisticated algorithms. By taking advantage of NVIDIA’s GPU computing platform, ENI is able to accelerate seismic workloads as well as develop new AI-based approaches to energy discovery and processing.
The system’s main components are 1,820 Dell EMC PowerEdge C4140 servers, each with two Intel Xeon Scalable Gold 6252 with built-in AI acceleration and 24-cores plus four NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs. The servers are connected by a Mellanox InfiniBand HDR network of 200 Gbit/s speed and use full non-blocking topology to ensure the most efficient server and data storage connection.
“We are proud of our more than ten-year partnership with Eni, a company with an international reputation for excellence and with innovation and sustainability a key part of its strategy”, said Adrian McDonald, EMEA President, Dell Technologies. “Eni’s mission for sustainability aligns well with that of Dell Technologies’ own vision for how technology can benefit society and that’s just one of the many reasons I am delighted we are a technology partner with Eni on their new HPC5 supercomputer. By companies working together we can achieve increasingly ambitious environmental goals.”
“Today Eni unveils a supercomputing system with key features which are unique in the industrial 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. 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.