Eni launches Europe’s ‘most powerful’ supercomputer to aid decarbonisation efforts

ITALIAN oil giant Eni has switched on its next generation supercomputer, ranked the most powerful in Europe, marking a “pivotal” step forward in the company’s decarbonisation strategy. 

High Performance Computing 6 (HPC6) is based at Eni’s Green Data Center in the small town of Ferrera Erbognone near Pavia and is estimated to operate at a peak of 606 petaflops. 

A petaflop is a unit of measure for the calculating speed of a computer equal to one quadrillion floating-point operations per second. 

HPC6’s innovations

Building on top of Eni’s established HPC4 and HPC5 systems, which have a collective power of 70 petaflops, the supercomputer has been developed to improve the accuracy of geological and fluid dynamic studies for CO2 storage and to create “high-performance” batteries. 

Eni has installed a new liquid cooling system in HPC6, which uses a direct liquid approach to dissipate 96% of the heat generated.

Claudio Descalzi, Eni’s CEO, said: “Technological advancements allow us to use energy more efficiently by reducing emissions and promoting the development of new energy solutions. 

“We have integrated supercomputing throughout our entire business chain, transforming it into an indispensable lever for achieving net zero and creating value.”

Supercomputers in oil and gas

Supercomputers can be  used to collect a range of explorative data, including seismic mapping and 3D imaging. They are energy and resource efficient in that they can reduce the number of oil wells by helping companies more accurately identify the best places for drilling. 

Eni has manufactured its own in-house computing systems since 2000 for the exploration of new oil and gas reserves. HPC5, which was launched in 2020, has been used primarily to identify natural gas reserves. 

Other oil firms, including Shell and Exxon, have also worked with the US’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) to leverage supercomputers in oil and gas exploration.