Eni HPC4 HPC in Italy Upgraded by HPE

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP announced the upgrade of Eni‘s existing HPC system, HPC4, to accelerate discovery of new energy sources.

Eni is an integrated energy company whose dedication to the energy transition translates into tangible actions aimed at achieving the total decarbonization of products and processes by 2050.

Eni Green Data Center in Ferrera Erbognone

The HPC, delivered as a service through the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, will increase HPC4 performance, improve its computing capacity when running simulations, and double storage capacity to improve accuracy of image-intensive modeling and simulations of complex energy research.

The GreenLake platform, which combines simplicity and agility with the governance, visibility and compliance of an on-premises environment, will allow Eni to monitor HPC4 utilization lyand energy consumption, helping to increase sustainability.

Eni will house the new HPC4 in the Green Data Center in Ferrera Erbognone, a province in Pavia, Italy. The new HPC4 is built on HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 Plus servers.

“In the Age of Insight, harnessing data efficiently and quickly will play a significant role in driving optimal business results,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO, HPE. “Our comprehensive HPC solutions and GreenLake support Eni in achieving greater image accuracy of critical seismic analysis and are key to unlocking outcomes in energy production. We are thrilled to be part of Eni’s important mission to identify and develop new energy sources.“

Doubling storage capacity to support an increasing, image-intensive library of analysis
HPC4 has doubled its storage capacity, compared to previous system, with 10PB of storage, to support the scaling and image-intensity of its analysis, which are key to developing new energy sources. New expanded storage capabilities from HPE include the Cray ClusterStor E1000 storage system and the HPE Data Management Framework to support complex, image-intensive workloads in modeling and simulation.

The infrastructure will improve energy usage and reduce electronic waste by using HPE Asset Upcycling Services. This is part of the circular economy initiative from HPE Financial Services, which leverages asset longevity to reuse products, by recycling equipment from its existing HPC4 system and replacing it with newer solutions.

“HPC plays an increasingly important role in fueling innovation, which has a tremendous impact on economic growth for Italy. The ability to process and extract value from data helps organizations identify new opportunities to stay competitive,” said Stefano Venturi, president and MD, HPE Italy. “We are honored to have been selected by Eni to deploy powerful supercomputing technologies that will drive innovation for the energy industry as well as digital transformation for our nation.“

New HPC4 is built with 1,500 nodes HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 Plus servers, which provide dense, flexible platforms with built-in security. The customized servers also leverage latest compute with the 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors for modeling and simulation workloads, and accelerated compute and targeted graphics capabilities for image-intensive workloads using the AMD Instinct MI100 accelerator and NVIDIA V100 and A100 Tensor Core GPUs.

The GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform provides customers with a powerful foundation to drive digital transformation. The platform can run on-premises, at the edge, or in a colocation facility, and combines the simplicity and agility of the cloud with the governance, compliance, and visibility that comes with hybrid IT. GreenLake offers a range of cloud services that accelerate innovation, including cloud services for analytics, bare metal, compute, container management, core payment systems, data protection, electronic medical records, 5G, HCI, HPC, ML operations, networking, risk management, SAP HANA, storage, VDI, and VMs. The GreenLake business is growing with over $5.2 billion in total contract value and 900 partners selling GreenLake. It has about 1,200 enterprise customers across 50 countries in all industry sectors and sizes including Fortune 500 companies, government and public sector organizations, and small and mid-market enterprises.