Il fastest industrial supercomputer in the world is located in Italia and is owned by Eni. Launched in 2020, its full name is High Performance Computing 5 (HPC5), where the number 5 indicates the evolution compared to the previous HPC4 supercomputer, which is still operational. This evolution translates into one computing power tripled from 18 to 52 PetaFlopsallowing the Eni supercomputing ecosystem to reach a total peak power of 70 PetaFlops, that is to say 70 million billion mathematical operations carried out in one second.
Like its predecessors, HPC5 is a “Hybrid” system, that is, that combines the flexibility of CPUs (the traditional heart of every computer) with GPUs (specialized processors born for graphics processing but now used as the real accelerators of the overall computing power). Eni was the first entity in the industrial sector to adopt, since 2013, a technological architecture of this type, which today dominates the high-end supercomputing systems in the world.
This remarkable computational capacity, however, does not seem to compromise theenergy efficiency of HPC5, which is in fact placed in the top of the ranking of the greenest supercomputers in the world. This means less electricity consumption for each Petaflop than the average. What is the real consumption in terms of energy? A single Watt of electricity allows the HPC5 to calculate almost twenty billion operations per second, therefore a very efficient energy consumption, if we consider that a mid-range computer requires between 65 and 70 Watts in idle phase and up to 200-250 Watt when processing at full capacity.
Among other things, the Green Data Center, the data center in the province of Pavia that hosts HPC4 and HPC5, is characterized by a very particular eco-friendly design, which allows enormous CO2 savings every year. It is possible to calculate that thanks to its particular design the Green Data Center allows a saving of about 4,500 tons of CO2 per year compared to a normal data center.
Thanks to Eni’s supercomputer it is possible to accelerate the transition to the use of renewable energies, for example by designing plants to extract energy from the sun or the sea or by studying the behavior of the plasma inside future plants for magnetic confinement fusion. HPC5 also makes it possible to use advanced reservoir models that allow for the optimization of geological exploration for “traditional” business, thus increasing the efficiency and sustainability of the related processes.
But not only. The supercomputing infrastructures of HPC5 and Eni’s expertise in molecular modeling have recently been applied also in the research of drugs to fight the Coronavirus within the European project Exscalate4CoV. Eni’s supercomputer offered its calculation contribution in the molecular dynamic simulation of viral proteins considered relevant in the infection mechanism, with the aim of being able to identify, through the use of databases containing up to 10,000 pharmaceutical compounds, the most effective in the treatment of Covid-19.
National Supercomputing Center
In the digital field, collaborations with prestigious external institutes are fundamental for Eni. An example above all is the birth of the National Supercomputing Centerbased in Technopole of Bologna, which can count on almost 320 million euros of resources and on 51 founding members distributed throughout the national territory, coming from the public and private sectors, from the world of scientific research and industry. The Centre’s activities started in September with the aim of creating the largest Italian system dedicated to high-performance computing, big data management and quantum computing.
“The Center will carry out research and development activities at national and international level in favor of innovation in the field of simulations, calculation and analysis of high-performance data. Activities carried out starting from an internationally advanced infrastructure for High performance computing and big data management, capable of systematizing resources and promoting and integrating emerging technologies. It will also support higher education and promote the development of policies for responsible data management with a view to open data and open science. It also provides for the involvement of Italian companies to build a synergy between the scientific communities and the industrial world ”, he explains the Infn, the National Institute of Nuclear Physics which proposed the “National Research Center in High Performance Computing, Big Data and Quantum Computing” (this is the full name of the Center). Infn is one of the members of the Icsc Foundation, the body that will manage the Bologna structure envisaged by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan.