Alex Kimani
Alex Kimani is a veteran finance writer, investor, engineer and researcher for Safehaven.com.
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By Alex Kimani – Jan 04, 2025, 6:00 PM CST
- Italian energy giant Eni has launched its €100 million HPC6 supercomputer.
- Supercomputers like Eni’s, along with AI applications, are revolutionizing energy exploration.
- Other major companies such as ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP are leveraging AI-driven technologies in their operations.
Italian oil and gas giant Eni S.p.A (NYSE:E) has launched its next-generation supercomputer that will help it to ramp up oil and gas discovery technology and support its decarbonization strategies. Based at Eni’s Green Data Center in the small town of Ferrera Erbognone, the €100m High-Performance Computing 6 (HPC6) machine is estimated to operate at the peak of 606 petaflops, powering a number of artificial intelligence functions, as well as highly sophisticated calculations, with the help of nearly 14,000 graphics processing units (GPUs). Eni’s latest supercomputer is the world’s 5th most powerful, achieving nearly half an exascale of performance on the LINPACK benchmark.
“Technological advancements allow us to use energy more efficiently by reducing emissions and promoting the development of new energy solutions,’’ said Claudio Descalzi, Eni’s CEO. “We have integrated supercomputing throughout our entire business chain, transforming it into an indispensable lever for achieving net zero and creating value,’’ he added.
Supercomputing is a form of high-performance computing that determines or calculates by using a powerful computer, a supercomputer, reducing overall time to solution. Unlike traditional computers, supercomputers use more than one central processing unit (CPU). These CPUs are grouped into compute nodes, comprising a processor or a group of processors—symmetric multiprocessing (SMP)—and a memory block. A supercomputer can contain tens of thousands of nodes that can collaborate on solving a specific problem. Supercomputing is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). Petaflops are a measure of a computer’s processing speed equal to a thousand trillion flops. And a 1-petaflop computer system can perform one quadrillion (1015) flops. From a different perspective, supercomputers can have one million times more processing power than the fastest laptop.
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Because supercomputers are often used to run artificial intelligence programs, supercomputing has become synonymous with AI. This regular use is because AI programs require high-performance computing that supercomputers offer. In other words, supercomputers can handle the types of workloads typically needed for AI applications. Supercomputers can be used to collect and analyze a range of explorative data, including seismic mapping and 3D imaging. Several Big Oil companies, including Exxon Mobil Corp. (NYSE:XOM), have also worked with the US’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) to leverage supercomputers in oil and gas exploration. According to Bruce Porter, chief science officer for Texas-based big-data analytics firm SparkCognition,