Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Eni Build Enterprise Supercomputer for AI

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is building a next-generation supercomputer called HPC6 for Eni, a large energy provider. Eni will use the system to advance scientific discovery and engineering toward accelerating innovation in energy transition, the company reports. Once completed, HPC6 reportedly will be one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers owned by an enterprise, a distinction, as the top systems are typically owned by public entities and research institutions, the companies report.

HPC6 will be built with HPE Cray EX4000 systems featuring AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct accelerators to support data and image-intensive workloads across artificial intelligence (AI), modeling and simulation. The system will augment Eni’s existing research that is focused on studying and identifying new energy sources, including renewable energy. HPC6 will increase Eni’s available computational power.

“Businesses are finding themselves balancing the huge business opportunities enabled by their AI investments with the responsibility of mitigating the environmental impact of these powerful systems,” says Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE. “As the leader in developing energy efficient AI and supercomputing solutions, HPE is uniquely positioned to help organizations minimize power consumption while maximizing business outcomes.”

Eni’s HPC6 will be installed in the company’s energy efficient Green Data Center in Italy, which will be upgraded to support HPE’s direct liquid-cooling (DLC) capabilities. DLC cools compute-intensive systems using less energy than air-cooled systems. HPE has built six of the top 10 most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world according to the Green500 list published in November 2023.

The system will also include the HPE Slingshot Interconnect, an open Ethernet-based high performance network designed to support exascale workloads, and HPE Cray ClusterStor E1000, a Lustre-based, open-source parallel file system storage.

"Fueling AI-driven research using supercomputing will significantly drive scientific discovery and accelerate innovation,” says Claudio Bassoli, president and managing director of HPE Italy. 

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.