Oil and gas giant ExxonMobil has unveiled its Discovery 6 supercomputer, set to be installed in the first half of 2025.
The system was developed through a partnership between HPE, Nvidia, and ExxonMobil, with the three companies saying Discovery 6 represents a “significant advancement” in supercomputing technology.
The Discovery 6 will be combined with ExxonMobil’s elastic Full Wavefield Inversion (eFWI) technology to enable 4D seismic imaging of the Earth, allowing the company to locate oil and gas deposits for extraction “with unprecedented accuracy.”
Built by HPE, the Cray Supercomputing EX4000 machine consists of 4,032 Nvidia Grace Hopper Superchips, interconnected by HPE Slingshot technology and employing “energy-efficient 100 percent direct liquid cooling.”
The system will have a 4x faster computational performance networking than its predecessor, Discovery 5, a 26.13 petaflops system that was installed in 2022 and ranked 46th on the most recent edition of the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
“Supercomputing continues to play a critical role in making scientific discoveries for a range of fields with significant impact,” said HPE in a statement. “Companies such as ExxonMobil continue to demonstrate real-world value by applying supercomputing to conduct complex earth science.”
