Italian energy giant Eni is firing up the world’s most powerful supercomputer outside the US this Christmas as it races rivals to build the technology infrastructure needed to better explore for new sources of oil and gas. Built at a cost of more than €100mn, Eni’s new machine, HPC6, will be switched on in the small Italian town of Ferrera Erbognone, population 1,140. It contains almost 14,000 AMD graphics processing units: high-powered chips used to perform complex calculations and run artificial intelligence processes. The supercomputer took fifth place in an annual list of the world’s fastest computers last month with a benchmark speed of 477 petaflops per second, behind three US research computers and Microsoft’s cloud-based Eagle computer. Its job will be to crunch data to discover new oil and gas reservoirs, as well as to perform calculations to advance clean energy. Lorenzo Fiorillo, the head of Eni’s research and digital department, said the computer was almost nine times faster than its predecessor and that Eni was one of the few oil companies that has kept building its own machines, rather than switching to buying cloud computing services.
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Full story : Italian energy giant Eni launches its HPC6 supercomputer, the most powerful outside the US, costing €100M to build and using 14K AMD GPUs, to find oil and gas.