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Italian energy giant Eni is launching the world's strongest supercomputer outside the United States this Christmas, competing with rivals to construct the technology infrastructure needed to raised explore recent oil and gas sources.
Eni's recent machine, HPC6, was built for greater than 100 million euros and will likely be put into operation within the small Italian town of Ferrera Erbognone with 1,140 inhabitants. It comprises almost 14,000 AMD graphics processors: high-performance chips used to perform complex calculations and run artificial intelligence processes.
The supercomputer ranked fifth in an annual list of the world's fastest computers last month, behind three U.S. research computers and Microsoft's cloud-based Eagle computer, with a benchmark speed of 477 petaflops per second.
Its job will likely be to process data to find recent oil and gas deposits and perform calculations to advance clean energy.
Lorenzo Fiorillo, Eni's head of research and digital, said the pc was almost nine times faster than its predecessor and that Eni was one in all the few oil firms that continued to construct its own machines as an alternative of switching to purchasing cloud computing services .
“Many other firms realized that it might be more efficient to rent time on another person's supercomputer,” said Rob West, an analyst at Thunder Said Energy, adding that Exxon, Shell and Chevron have supercomputers on the U.S. National Center for Supercomputing would have used applications and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Eni's supercomputing division has helped the Italian company boost its fame in oil and gas exploration. “We were capable of find oil in places where we didn’t see anything,” Fiorillo said. He noted that along with computing power, Eni has also built significant capabilities in coding the algorithms to run HPC6. “We began producing our own code within the Eighties,” Fiorillo said.
“We have used the supercomputer in all of our latest discoveries,” he added, saying that the intense computing power had helped Eni navigate the so-called pre-salt layer, a series of geological formations beneath thick layers of salt on each side of the South Atlantic. “Our algorithms can create clear images of where the oil is and the way big it’s,” he said.
While oil firms have been using supercomputers to interpret seismic data and model the behavior of oil and gas reservoirs for years, they at the moment are also increasingly using AI for every thing from creating digital twins of their assets to generating a whole lot of various options for drilling oil fields and where your drill holes ought to be placed.
Fiorillo said his research team now spends 70 percent of its time on clean energy and that HPC6 is getting used to review the best way to handle plasma clouds in nuclear fusion reactors to find recent materials; increase the efficiency of devices that capture carbon emissions; and determining the best way to make higher solar panels.
The company declined to comment on whether supercomputers would soon be eclipsed by massive computer systems just like the Colossus data center created by Elon Musk in Memphis, Tennessee. However, its own data center in Ferrera Erbognone, just over 25 miles southwest of Milan, is “well positioned for upcoming expansions”.
