HPC: oil and gas
Our customers are looking to bring the problem to the data, rather than the other way round, to save the costly effort of having to move the data in the first place.’ Noer believes that the application of HPC
within oil and gas is growing beyond the data management side. ‘Until now, many oil and gas companies have a dedicated HPC department, which is entirely separate from their day-to- day IT department,’ he says. ‘However, we are seeing the adoption of HPC technologies even within the IT departments too. We see this trend continuing even beyond energy companies.’ DDN has years of experience in providing
The data-intensive part of oil and gas exploration is seismic processing
number of specialised third party simulation packages in the oil and gas industry, such as Schlumberger’s Eclipse, which means that users of that soſtware can access the functionality of the PBS Works suite directly from the Eclipse interface. On the HPC side, PBS Professional is able to schedule jobs executing that soſtware, according to the number of licenses available.’
The storage challenge Panasas has been involved in supplying the oil and gas industry with storage solutions for several years. Barbara Murphy, chief marketing officer, says: ‘Panasas has been operating in the energy sector since our inception. Our scalable, high performance system suits the size and complexity of the data sets they are dealing with. ‘We’ve worked with third-party seismic
soſtware vendors to help them parallelise their applications for the workload, and that’s really helped us gain market share. It remains our largest growth sector, as the energy industry has moved from a long period of being in “extraction” mode to once again return to “discovery” mode. With the price of oil and gas continuing to climb, it’s now worth the investment in complex extraction. We have installations in over 50 countries, in environments as diverse as deserts, the Arctic circle, mountains and so on. Tese are oſten in very remote, inclement areas with minimal IT facilities. Te design of our units makes them particularly easy to service. ‘Oil and gas is one of the most mature
industries when it comes to using HPC for its scientific workload. From that point of view, the market was early to adopt parallel file systems and scale out architectures to manage both the complexity of the simulations they are running
20 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD
and the scale of the storage required for the data they’re creating.’ Geoffrey Noer, senior director of product
marketing, adds: ‘Within seismic processing, there is a continuing push for ever-finer detail at a more granular level. As that happens, the drive is towards larger and larger compute clusters to process the data, as well as the need for faster and faster storage. Te faster you can process the data, the faster you can make a decision about where to drill. Tis is why, in seismic processing deployments, you oſten see thousands of compute nodes, rather than the tens or hundreds many other HPC applications demand.’
THE FASTER YOU CAN PROCESS THE DATA, THE FASTER YOU CAN MAKE A DECISION ABOUT WHERE TO DRILL
As the years go by, data accumulates, and
this creates a challenge. Murphy continues: ‘All seismic data is valuable, and it is so expensive to collect that no data is ever thrown away. Some of our customers are still referring to data that they extracted 20 years ago. Te earth’s structure won’t have changed in that time, but the tools to pull out and analyse that data do evolve. Oil and gas, therefore, is an industry that has a massive scale out problem; we don’t talk about terabytes here, we talk about petabytes – and it’s tens of petabytes of new storage every year. ‘Seismic processing is compute intensive,
network intensive and storage intensive. So, moving data around becomes a real problem.
the storage behind HPC, and more recently has been supplying such products to the oil and gas market. ‘Te real data-intensive part of oil and gas is seismic processing,’ says DDN’s James Coomer. ‘Te data capture itself takes place in odd locations such as on ships in the middle of oceans or on vehicles in deserts. Storage has a major part to play here in two roles: first, in the ingestion rates – that is, collecting the highest resolution data possible from the sensors, which can be from 1GB/s upwards; and second, the processing of that data into, for example, a 3D map. ‘Our storage can cope with the high data rates
during the ingestion period, and also in the processing part, when thousands of nodes may be accessing the storage at the same time. In oil and gas, data rates in this latter part of the process can be typically 6GB/s and maybe much higher. It is easy to migrate from a traditional NAS storage system to one of our parallel file systems, so users need make no changes within the application. Tis is important for industries such as oil and gas, who can now take advantage of the faster data rates offered by parallel file systems without impacting the surrounding systems. ‘Te industry is becoming ever more
complex; the acquisition and exploration process is becoming more precise and using more complicated algorithms. So both the compute side and the amount of data being ingested is always going up.’
Looking ahead Acceleware’s McGarry concludes: ‘Te current HPC generation has, for the first time, given us the ability to base production seismic imaging soſtware on realistic physics. In the coming years we will see ever more complex physics being simulated, for example elastic RTM will supplement the current acoustic-based version to account for elastic deformation of the Earth due to the seismic disturbance. Full Waveform Inversion, which has long been the Holy Grail in terms of building structural Earth models, will become increasingly common. And these developments will require significantly more computational power.’
@scwmagazine l
www.scientific-computing.com
DDN
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