Italian energy company Eni has announced it is building a 600 petaflops supercomputing system called HPC6.
The company said the machine will use HPE Cray EX4000 system, containing 3,472 computing nodes housing a total of 13,888 GPUs, organized into 28 racks. Each node will consist of 64-core AMD Epyc CPU and four high-performance AMD Instinct MI250X GPUs.
HPE Cray ClusterStor E1000 technologies will be used for the system’s storage, alongside HPE Slingshot Interconnect, an open Ethernet-based fabric, and Dragonfly topology.
HPC6 will have a maximum power consumption of 10.17MVA, and will use direct liquid cooling technology that dissipates 96 percent of generated heat.
A 600 petaflops system would give Eni’s supercomputer second place on the current Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers, overtaking the Aurora system housed at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility in Illinois, US, and achieved an HPL benchmark (high performance Linpack) score of 585.34 petaflops, based on only half of the planned final system.
The top spot is held by Frontier, which has an HPL score of 1.194 exaflops and is the only exascale system recognized in the list.
“Through this initiative, we continue to demonstrate our technological leadership, reaffirming Eni’s role in supercomputing and relaunching our ambitions through dedicated infrastructure,” said Eni’s CEO, Claudio Descalzi.
He added: “This project underlines our ongoing commitment to innovation and digitalization, while also supporting our energy transition process. The new HPC system significantly enhances our computational capabilities and marks a pivotal shift in the way we address challenges related to energy security, competitiveness, and sustainability."
Eni currently owns two supercomputer systems, HPC4 and HPC5, which have a combined computing power of 70 petaflops.
The HPC6 system will be housed alongside the two less powerful systems at Eni’s Green Data Center in Ferrera Erbognone, a province in the Italian region of Lombardy.
According to Eni, its Green Data Center is one of the most energy-efficient and carbon footprint-friendly computing centers in Europe. Partly powered by a 1MW photovoltaic power plant, for 92 percent of the year the machines are cooled by air circulating at low speed, reducing the use of air conditioning throughout the facility.
