Unlock Editor’s Digest for free
FT editor Roula Khalaf has chosen her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Italian energy giant Eni is launching the world’s most powerful supercomputer outside the United States this Christmas, as it races with competitors to build the technology infrastructure needed to better explore new oil and gas sources.
Built at a cost of more than 100 million euros, Eni’s new machine HPC6 will be put into operation in Ferrera El Bignone, a small Italian town with a population of 1,140 people. It has approximately 14,000 AMD graphics processing units. These high-performance chips are used to perform complex calculations and run artificial intelligence processes.
Last month, the supercomputer ranked fifth on the annual list of the world’s fastest computers with a benchmark speed of 477 petaflops per second, behind three American research computers and Microsoft’s cloud-based Eagle computer.
Its job is to process data to discover new oil and gas reservoirs and perform calculations to advance clean energy.
Lorenzo Fiorillo, head of research and digital at Eni, said the computer is almost nine times faster than the previous generation of computers, and that Eni is using its own machine rather than switching to purchasing cloud computing services. He said it is one of the few oil companies that continues to produce oil.
“A lot of other companies have realized that it’s more efficient to use other people’s supercomputers,” said Rob West, an analyst at Sander Said Energy, adding that Exxon, Shell and Chevron are the only companies in the U.S. National Supercomputer. He added that supercomputers were being used at the training center. Applications and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Eni’s supercomputing division has helped the Italian company improve its reputation in oil and gas exploration. “We were able to find oil in places where we couldn’t see anything,” Fiorillo said. He noted that Eni has built significant capabilities not only in computing power but also in coding algorithms to run HPC6. “We started writing our own code in the 1980s,” Fiorillo said.
“We used supercomputers in all of our latest discoveries,” he added, noting that the extreme computing power will help Eni discover the so-called pre-salt formations, a series of geological formations beneath thick layers of salt on both sides of the south. The Atlantic Ocean said it helped navigate the layers. “Our algorithm can give us a clear picture of where the oil is and how big it is,” he says.
Oil companies have been using supercomputers for years to interpret seismic data and model the behavior of oil and gas reservoirs, but now everything from creating digital twins of assets to knowing how to drill There is also increasing use of AI to do everything from generating a hundred different options. Location of oil fields and their wells.
Recommended
Fiorillo said his research team now spends 70 percent of its time on clean energy, and HPC6 will be used to study how to manage plasma clouds in fusion reactors to discover new materials. He said it would be. Increase the efficiency of equipment that captures carbon dioxide emissions. And figuring out how to make better solar panels.
The company declined to comment on whether supercomputers will soon overshadow giant computing systems like Elon Musk’s Colossus data center in Memphis, Tennessee. However, the company said its data center in Ferrera el Bognone, just over 40 kilometers southwest of Milan, is “well positioned for future expansion.”