Supercomputing is applied in areas that we would not even suspect. For example, it is a key resource of many energy companies. One of them is the European Eni, which has just turned on the most powerful supercomputer in the world outside the United States. This is the HPC6, which has cost more than 100 million euros and boasts an enormous calculation capacity.
We are talking about a machine with 3,472 nodes that group the same number of AMD EPYC CPUs and 13,888 AMD Instinct MI250X GPUs. Everything works under a direct liquid cooling system. The result? Eni now has at its disposal a supercomputer with a peak computing power of 606 PFlops (Rpeak) and 477 sustained PFlops (Rmax).
The most powerful supercomputer in Europe
If we focus on the Top500 ranking index, the HPC6 ranks as the most powerful in Europe. Globally it is in fifth place, immediately after the Microsoft Azure Eagle computer (yes, Microsoft has a beast of equipment for its cloud computing service). The first place remains for the Frontier supercomputer.
As we know, this type of high-performance infrastructure usually requires enormous amounts of energy. It seems that Eni has taken this into account, installing its new machine within what they have called the Green Data Center. It is located in Ferrera Erbognone, a small commune in the Italian region of Lombardy.
Green Data Center De Eni
To reduce energy consumption, the company says it has innovated in the cooling system, which promises dissipate 96% of heat. In addition, part of the campus’s electrical energy comes from a 1 MW photovoltaic plant. Taken together, this should also help reduce the supercomputer’s carbon footprint.
The big question is what it will be used for. Eni has a very specific list of scenarios where it will take advantage of its new 100 million euro tool. These are the optimization of industrial facilities, the improvement of geological studies, the study of fluid dynamics for CO2, the optimization of the biofuel supply chain and more.
Now, high-performance computing is not new for the Italian company. They have been using it for some time to develop more efficient batteries and create innovative materials for applications in biochemistry. Eni has also used supercomputers to simulate the behavior of plasma in fusion by magnetic confinement.
Images | Eni
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