Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is building a next-generation supercomputer called HPC6 for Eni, one of the world’s largest energy providers. Eni will use the system to advance scientific discovery and engineering toward accelerating innovation in energy transition. Eni has a long history of using supercomputers to aid its goal of reaching net zero.
Once completed, HPC6 will be one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers owned by an enterprise, a notable distinction as the top systems are typically owned by public entities and research institutions.
HPC6 will be built with HPE Cray EX4000 systems featuring AMD EPYC™ CPUs and AMD Instinct™ accelerators, the same innovations powering the world’s fastest supercomputer to support data and image-intensive workloads across artificial intelligence (AI), modeling, and simulation. The system will augment Eni’s existing research that is focused on studying and identifying new energy sources, including renewable energy. HPC6 will increase Eni’s available computational power to a theoretical peak performance of 600 quadrillion (600 followed by 15 zeroes) floating point operations per second, or 600 petaFLOP/s.
“Businesses are finding themselves balancing the huge business opportunities enabled by their AI investments with the responsibility of mitigating the environmental impact of these powerful systems,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE. “As the leader in developing energy efficient AI and supercomputing solutions, HPE is uniquely positioned to help organizations minimize power consumption while maximizing business outcomes. We are excited to play a role in Eni’s commitment to decarbonization supported by digitalization and innovation.”
Eni’s HPC6 will be installed in the company’s energy efficient Green Data Center in Italy, which will be upgraded to support HPE’s direct liquid-cooling (DLC) capabilities. DLC cools compute-intensive systems using less energy than air-cooled systems. HPE has built six of the top 10 most energy efficient supercomputers in the world according to the Green500 list published in November 2023. The system will also include the HPE Slingshot Interconnect, an open Ethernet-based high performance network designed to support exascale workloads, and HPE Cray ClusterStor E1000, a Lustre-based, open-source parallel file system storage for faster, efficient performance.
“Fueling AI-driven research using supercomputing will significantly drive scientific discovery and accelerate innovation,” said Claudio Bassoli, president and managing director of HPE Italy. “We are proud that Eni has entrusted HPE with this pivotal project that prioritizes energy efficiency in its mission to advance discovery and development of new energy sources.”
