Digging for
black gold
The oil and gas industry pushes HPC capabilities to their limits, as Warren Clark discovers
imminently. Tose fears have been with us for more than a decade or so – but, thanks in part to HPC, the pace of extraction is yet to slow up at all. Dr Raymond McGarry, seismic research team
A
lead at Acceleware, says: ‘HPC is absolutely indispensable within the oil and gas industry today, particularly on the upstream side, with
16 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD
s the earth’s natural resources continue to be plundered, there are fears that the pace at which oil and gas can be extracted will slow up
compute- and data-intensive applications such as seismic processing and reservoir simulation.’ Supermicro’s Tau Leng believes that
customers in oil and gas are major drivers in HPC development. ‘Money talks,’ says Leng. ‘Oil and gas has the highest refresh rate across all of the sectors that HPC addresses. Every year, they keep upgrading the technology, and the lifecycle of a server might only be three or four years. HPC is playing a part in maintaining the pace of oil and gas extraction by helping to find resources quicker.’
Darren Foltinek, RTM product manager
at Acceleware, adds: ‘Te entire history of geophysics has been a matter of approximating the physics so that a useful image can be produced on the computers of the day. As computing power has grown, these physics approximations have become more and more accurate, but there are still vastly simplifying assumptions being made in order to keep compute costs reasonable.’ McGarry adds: ‘Te impact of modern
HPC solutions hasn’t simply been about making the same old applications run faster. Te greater impact is in making completely new things possible – which is timely, given the advanced state of exploitation of “easily-
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