High Performance Computing as part of Smarter Oil and Gas initiative

It's not correct to suppose that oil and gas industry is quite simple and evident. For getting more and more resources companies should use more complex technologies improving efficiency and performance, but nevertheless many companies are unable to monitor, predict and proactively respond to critical oilfield events. In this article there will be shown several areas in which HPC can help companies from oil&gas industry in optimizing different procedures and processes, reducing charges and improving revenue and getting competitive advantages.

First of all it’s necessary to define the term “High performance computing”. There’s no fixed definition of this term. This is because the performance of microprocessors has increased in an exponential way for many years, so any such definition is out of date quickly. It’s more usual to consider a computer to be high performance if uses multiple processors (tens, hundreds or even thousands) connected together by some kind of network for tasks that cannot be solved in a reasonable amount of time with today’s computers.

Certainly IBM is not alone in offering customers such type of systems, but IBM has the widest portfolio of different platforms, products and technologies in this direction, p.e. hardware products: BlueGene/Q, Intelligent Cluster, HPC Cloud, Power 755/775 and other, software stack: GPFS, FileNet, Compilers e t.c. Beside this no other company has such experience in this field as IBM with more than 50 years practice with leading oil&gas companies.

So, where high performance computing can be used in petroleum industry? First way need to be mentioned is processing seismic data. Because of continuous development of equipment and tools for collecting seismic data it’s necessary to get new resources for manipulating this data. The second way for use HPC is modeling and design new products and materials. Beside this HPC for visualization can be allocated as third way of using. It’s very important to notice, that HPC can be used not only for science tasks, but also for business needs. As example - risk analysis based on HPC for better understanding benefits and costs, payback period, investment return rate e t.c.  Generally HPC can also be used in BI field being the core for the whole BI system. As result company which is used HPC gets competitive advantage in the market and has an opportunity to increase its business growth and revenue. Certainly it can be told, that for these workloads and tasks customer can use more simple and maybe cheaper system, but the main advantage of HPC is an opportunity to get real-time info with minimum delay.

Here there is summary of ways for using HPC in oil&gas industry:

• Processing seismic data
• Modeling and design new products and materials
• Visualization
• Real-time risk analysis
• Business intelligence
• Getting competitive advantages