Mineral Discovery
Assembly Line
Eni fires up €100mn supercomputer in race to find oil and gas reservoirs
Built at a cost of more than €100mn, Eni’s new machine, HPC6, will be switched on in the small Italian town of Ferrera Erbognone, population 1,140. It contains almost 14,000 AMD graphics processing units: high-powered chips used to perform complex calculations and run artificial intelligence processes.
“We have used the supercomputer in all of our latest discoveries,” Lorenzo Fiorillo, the head of Eni’s research and digital department, added, saying that extreme computing power helped Eni navigate the so-called pre-salt layer, a series of geological formations beneath thick layers of salt on both sides of the south Atlantic. “Our algorithms can create clear images of where the oil is and how big it is,” he said.