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Italian oil and gas giant Eni S.p.A 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.
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, applying Generative AI for seismic imaging has broad and far-reaching implications: the technology can dramatically cut oil and gas exploration timelines from nine months to less than nine days. SparkCognition has partnered with Microsoft to incorporate the Azure C3 Internet of Things platform in its offshore operations. The platform uses AI to drive efficiencies across offshore infrastructure, from drilling and extraction to employee empowerment and safety.
Shell has announced plans to use AI-based technology from SparkCognition in its deep sea exploration and production in a bid to improve operational efficiency and speed as well as boost production.
Meanwhile, BP Plc (NYSE:BP) has partnered with Houston-based Belmont Technology which and developed a cloud-based geoscience platform nicknamed “Sandy.” Sandy allows BP to interpret geology, geophysics and reservoir project information thus creating unique “knowledge-graphs” including robust images of BP’s subsurface assets. BP is then able to perform simulations and interpret results using the program’s neural networks.
That said, Quantum Computing could be the next big foray by oil and gas companies into advanced computing. According to quantum machines developer, Quantum Computing Inc. (NASDAQ:QUBT), oil and gas executives at the recent KPMG Global Energy Conference in Houston named quantum computer technology as the next big breakthrough for the oil and gas sector. Quantum computers can optimize the sourcing, extraction, processing and logistics and also accelerate and improve the replanning response to risks and interruptions.
Quantum Computing stocks have exploded in recent weeks after Quantum Computing won a contract with NASA to apply its entropy quantum optimization machine, Dirac-3, to support NASA’s advanced imaging and data processing demands. The companies will use Dirac-3 to address the challenging phase unwrapping problem for optimally reconstructing images and extracting information from interferometric data generated by radar. QCi hopes that this project will highlight Dirac-3’s capabilities in providing superior solutions to non-deterministic polynomial time hard (NP-hard) problems. QUBT stock has rocketed 2,042% over the past 52 weeks; Rigetti Computing Inc. (NASDAQ:RGTI) +1,930%, D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE:QBTS) +1,064% and IonQ Inc. (NYSE:IONQ) +293%.
Three years ago, Matt Ocko, managing partner and co-founder of venture capital firm DCVC, predicted that quantum computing companies that get there first are likely to be ‘‘very impactful but transient” because conventional computers will eventually be able to catch up to quantum technology’s computational power. Nevertheless, the temporary advantage is likely to be very economically valuable.
