Our Stories
Our Stories
Nicola Bienati
Nicola Bienati, Ph.D. in Communications Engineering, works as Senior R&D Project Leader for Eni. His twenty-year collaboration with Italy’s most important energy company dates back to the years of his doctorate, obtained at the Politecnico di Milano with a thesis on geophysical imaging.
Since then, thanks to the rapid evolution of high-performance computing technologies, Nicola has contributed to the extraordinary technological development that today allows the company to address the most demanding challenges in the energy sector, starting with that of environmental sustainability.
His secret? A solid technical-scientific background, an analytical mentality oriented towards problem solving, an openness to the future and, above all, an inexhaustible intellectual curiosity that represents the most valuable legacy of his polytechnic training.
Nicola, tell us about your education and career.
I enrolled at the Politecnico in 1989, when the Como branch was inaugurated. I attended there for the first two years: in retrospect, it was a winning choice because at the time only the first-year courses were held in the Como branch and therefore there were no crowding problems or the need to get up at dawn. In those two years, I made the decision to move from Electronic Engineering to the newborn Telecommunications Engineering and, starting from my third year, I began attending courses in Milan. When I started working on my degree thesis, I approached for the first time the topics that I continued to deal with in the future and which have to do with the processing of seismic signals in order to create three-dimensional images of the subsoil.
After graduating in October 1996, I did my military service – which back then was mandatory – and the following year I enrolled in the Communications Engineering PhD program, under the supervision of Prof. Fabio Rocca. During my PhD I continued to work on issues related to image processing of seismic data, and I started to collaborate in Eni. Thanks to the cooperation between Eni and the Politecnico, after my doctorate I worked at the university for another year as a post-doc researcher and finally, in 2002, I joined the company.
In Eni I was immediately involved in the development of geophysical technologies for the imaging of seismic data, which is essential for investigating the subsoil in search of hydrocarbons. When I started I knew only the things I learned at the university (algorithms, techniques for numerical solution of partial differential equations, inverse problems ...). At Eni, I began to transform this knowledge, more theoretical than practical, into codes, also thanks to the extraordinary amount of data I was able to access, unimaginable for a university, and the computing resources necessary to apply algorithms to data.
Along with the development of computing applications, I followed the evolution of high-performance computing technologies. From this point of view, I was lucky enough to witness an exponential growth. In 2013, the first supercomputer installed by Eni had a computing power of half a petaflops (half a million billion mathematical operations per second). In seven years, we have gone from there to about 70 petaflops of computing capacity, with a system that, at the time of its installation in 2020, was the sixth in the world in terms of performance. Having witnessed this growth and being able to work on these technologies was a unique possibility as well as a personal satisfaction, since it is also the work done on the codes that led the company to invest in this direction.
This growth trend will continue in the future: today, new scenarios are emerging because the energy world is changing. We are in the midst of an energy transition and new applications are opening up, different from the ones we have always pursued. Instead of looking for oil and gas, we are searching for geological formations where we can store carbon dioxide, to help reduce its presence in the atmopshere. In this context, technologies for investigating and monitoring the subsoil have a new raison d’être.
What are the projects you are working on right now?
My main field remains that of three-dimensional imaging of the subsoil, which is still in constant evolution. The increase in computing power available today allows us to apply increasingly complex algorithms and remove approximations that in the past we were forced to introduce in the solution of the physical problems underlying our work. At the same time, the continuous improvement of these technologies goes hand in hand with the increase in their complexity, which requires a considerable effort to make this complexity accessible to those who are not experts in high-performance computing but are simply involved in the processing of data. It may seem paradoxical but most of the development activity does not aim so much to further refine the algorithms as to develop an interface that allows users to take full advantage of the machine’s potential.
The other front on which we are committed is that of the change towards a more sustainable energy landscape from an environmental point of view, which is certainly one of the top priorities for the entire energy industry.
What are, from your point of view, the main technological challenges that the energy sector will have to face in the coming years?
Sustainability is the fundamental issue in the medium to long term. On the one hand, it is necessary to make better use of the energy sources we already know, reducing their environmental impact. At the same time, we need to move towards inherently cleaner energy sources. With this in mind, Eni is currently developing a project in the field of nuclear fusion and is interested in the exploitation of geothermal energy. In perspective, the latter could represent an important opportunity and having the ability to investigate the subsoil will be essential to be able to grasp it.
What do you like most about your job?
I am thrilled by the possibility of facing new problems, of seeking effective solutions to concrete issues. Carrying out research and development in close contact with the production line is what makes it so interesting because it gives me the opportunity to experience the fruit of my work firsthand and to receive immediate feedbacks. Working side by side with colleagues who deal with data processing allows me to immediately understand what difficulties need to be solved. From there, I draw inspiration and try to develop the most effective solutions possible, which normally consist of a balanced mixture of efficiency and simplicity.
What was your experience at the Politecnico and how do you evaluate the training you received compared to the situations you found yourself facing while working in the company?
The training I received at the Politecnico was the best possible to address the problems and challenges I faced in my job. Only in retrospect I realized how important it was to have studied subjects that sounded cryptic at the time, such as mathematical analysis, how much value there was in what I did when I was a student.
My experience at the Politecnico gave me an aptitude for problem solving, the ability to analyze complex problems, reducing them to simpler problems. This ability to bring order even in contexts that most of the time are extremely chaotic was fundamental to succeed in what I did.
Another attitude that I learned at the Politecnico is the openness to the future. Teachers such as Giuseppe Drufuca and Fabio Rocca had fully realized that software would be a preponderant element in technological evolution, as indeed it was later demonstrated. In class they urged us students to take the software engineering course, a subject that among other things taught me also what it means to develop and manage a project, and it goes without saying that this is a very important aspect workwise.
Above all, at the Politecnico I learned the value of curiosity, of the desire to understand how things work, to ask questions, not to be satisfied with simple explanations and to understand the reasons why certain events occurred in certain ways.
Is there a funny anecdote you would like to share?
As I have already said, over the years I have dealt with high-performance computing, I mentioned the petaflop before. Well, I remember that one day Prof. Rocca said he had read somewhere that in order to simulate the brain of a pigeon you needed a computing power of a petaflops and that one day such computing power would be available. At the time I could not understand what he was talking about: it often happened that he said something that we, as students, could fully understand only after a few weeks or sometimes even a few years. In this case, only about ten years later, when ENI installed the first system with a computing capacity of three petaflops, I thought back to his words and fully grasped their meaning! Unfortunately, I don’t know if in the meantime someone has really managed to simulate the brain of a pigeon...
What advice would you give to a student aspiring to work in your industry?
I keep insisting on curiosity: be curious, try to tackle new problems, draw knowledge from many different fields. In addition to having a very solid background in numerical signal processing, it was useful for me to know some mathematics and physics without being a mathematician or a physicist, to be able to program a little without being a real programmer. It is necessary to know how to draw information from many different fields, making a synthesis that allows you to implement the most effective solution.
The second tip is to take advantage of everything you have learned at the Politecnico, to treasure everything you have studied, even if at the moment it is not always easy to understand how it will be useful.
Finally, it is very important not to neglect communication skills. When I was younger, communication was considered something secondary to technical-scientific training, but luckily some “enlightened” teachers such as the aforementioned Prof. Drufuca taught me to understand its importance. In the world of work, it is necessary to master the ability to communicate: even the most beautiful and important job in the world risks being turned into nothing if you are not able to explain it and make other people understand why it is so important.
In the light of your experience, do you think that collaboration between universities and companies represents an interesting model that can offer benefits to both parties?
Absolutely. The advantage, for the industry, is that the ideas and people they need to give continuity to their work come from the university. For universities, collaborating with companies means having a stronger motivation, understanding the problems that need to be tackled and, last but not least, dealing with the scale on which industry works, which is often completely different.
It fascinates me a lot. Over the past twenty years, I have seen projects that have left me speechless due to the scale of the problems they were able to solve. As an engineer, it is something that fills me with wonder. The Eni Green Data Center, for example, is a little gem: even if I am not a mechanical or a construction engineer, when I see it I can grasp the enormous amount of work it required, and there is a very fulfilling beauty in seeing such a complex idea turn into reality. For me it’s like admiring a painting!
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