The customer

The Research Centre for Non-Conventional Energy (RCNCE) is one of the largest industrial research centres in Europe. Since 2007, it has been involved in studying and developing new technologies for non-conventional energy sources, cleaning-up and environment recovery (innovative photovoltaic, production of energy from biomass and waste, soil sanitation, aquifer and contaminated waters ...).

Website: www.eni.com

The issue

Within its research activities, RCNCE relies also on complex technological solutions which can satisfy efficiently the exigencies of computerized modelling and simulation.

The main need was to give a modelling support to internal research groups which work in the energy sector, offering the possibility to interpret experimental data and to study new materials and processes.

More precisely, the Research Group needed:

• To accelerate the analysis of experimental data and to reduce costs
• To equip with a complete and scalable computing infrastructure
• To improve the workflow of its internal activities
• To rely on competent, professional and flexible technological partners

The solution

The preliminary analysis done with the customer allowed us to provide and install a modular HPC solution in compliance with the strategies of the research centre. Starting from a cluster with 4 nodes, the system evolved until it became a super-computational system with thousands of processors, according to the investments done,

Our solution for the Research Centre for Non-Conventional Energy:

• HPC Cluster for computational chemistry applications, based on Linux and open-source management software, introduced to replace the Sun systems already present within the company.
• Consolidation of the system during the years, by adding new nodes (from the initial 8 CPU cores to 952 now) and introducing technological improvements for the storage, frontend high availability, backup, monitoring, software for cluster management, ...
• Remote and onsite technical support.
• Consulting for technological choices and investment orientation.

Customer benefits

• Improvement of the computational models and consequent optimization of the work flows of the research group
• Capacity to analyze more complex data related to non-conventional energy research projects.
• Availability of an efficient and professional technical support and consulting service, based on a one-to-one collaboration.

Customer quote

We have chosen Aethia as we needed not only a simple technological vendor of HPC solutions, but also a professional partner, able to provide accurate consulting to cope with problems and different needs. Aethia is a dynamic, promising, interesting and reliable company, able to propose ad hoc, efficient and customizable solutions. Dr. Luca Longo, Technological Research and Innovation