Energy company TotalEnergies has launched the latest generation of its Pangea supercomputer.

Pangea 4 is housed at the Jean Féger Scientific and Technical Center at Pau in southwest France.

Consisting of a physical machine on site and access to computing capacity in the cloud – the Pangea@Cloud machine – the hybrid Pangea 4 system is smaller and more energy efficient than the Pangea II, using 87 percent less electricity than its predecessor.

The company did not disclose the compute power of the system. TotalEnergies, one of the seven supermajor oil companies, claimed that Pangea 4 will be used to support its green energy transition, including the creation of reservoir storage capacity simulations, calculating methane emissions reduction, and for the design and siting of wind farms.

Last year, research group Oil Change International reported that the company was the third largest approver of new oil and gas expansions and said that it was using record profits to “double down” on fossil fuel investments. Pangea 4 will likely also be used for fossil fuel workloads.

"As yet another demonstration of the company’s pioneer spirit, the latest incarnation of Pangea strengthens our lead in industrial digital simulation. It combines supercomputing capacity with cloud computing, allowing [TotalEnergies] to meet the growing and increasingly diverse needs of our activities, especially in new energies, in order to help grow our business through our energy transition strategy," said Namita Shah, president, OneTech at TotalEnergies

Pangea 4 follows the company’s 31.7 petaflops Pangea III system which remains in service and was described as the world’s most powerful commercial supercomputer upon its unveiling in 2019.