Italian multinational oil and gas giant Eni has launched a high performance computing (HPC) system that outperforms any other industrial supercomputer.

The HPC4, located at the Eni Green Data Center in Italy, delivers peak performance of 18.6 petaflops. When combined with the existing HPC3, the system reaches a computational peak capacity of 22.4 petaflops.

HPC4 is the only non-governmental and non-institutional system ranking among the top ten most powerful systems in the world, when checked against the latest Top500 supercomputer list from last November.

The title of the world’s most powerful corporate supercomputer previously belonged to BP’s nine petaflop machine located in Houston, North America.

The Italian stallion

Built out of hardware supplied by HPE, HPC4 is based on 1,600 ProLiant DL380 nodes, each equipped with two 24-core Intel Skylake processors - totaling more than 76,000 cores - and two Nvidia Tesla P100 GPUs, connected through a high-speed Enhanced Data Rate InfiniBand fabric.

The machine is linked to a high performance 15-petabyte storage subsystem.

The data center reportedly has a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.2 and uses free air cooling to help lower operational costs.

“The investments devoted to reinforcing the supercomputing infrastructure and the development of algorithms are a significant part of Eni’s digital transformation process,” Claudio Descalzi, CEO of Eni, said.

“We can store and process enormous quantities of data for geophysical imaging, the modeling of oil systems and reservoirs, in addition to using predictive and cognitive computing algorithms for all our business activities.”