Italy's Eni has set in motion plans to make its Green Data Center “the world’s most powerful supercomputer infrastructure in the industrial sphere” as is begins the upgrading of its new supercomputer system, HPC5.

The new system will triple the computing power of the existing system, HPC4, from 18 petaflops to 52 petaflops, the latter being equivalent to 52 million billion mathematical operations in a second.

“This is another milestone in digitalising the company,” Eni chief executive Claudio Descalzi said of HPC5, which is powered by Dell Technologies.

It will be made up of 1820 Dell EMC PowerEdge C4140 servers, each with a pair of Intel Gold 6252 24-core processors and four NVIDIA V100 GPU accelerators. It also comes with 15-petabytes of storage.

It will allow for faster processing of big data, which will “further accelerate R&D into non-fossil fuel energy sources, as well as supporting exploration, development and monitoring of oilfields during all stages”, Eni said.

HPC5 will also use energy produced by a solar plant at the Green Data Center to cut back on emissions.

“With HPC5, we are entering the world of exascale computing in the energy sector, which will revolutionise company processes in the future,” Descalzi added.

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Eni unveils huge new supercomputer