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World's Most Powerful Private Supercomputer Will Hunt Oil and Gas
Nerval's Lobster writes "French oil conglomerate Total has inaugurated the world's ninth-most-powerful supercomputer, Panega. Its purpose: seek out new reservoirs of oil and gas. The supercomputer's total output is 2.3 petaflops, which should place it about ninth on today's TOP500 list, last updated in November. The announcement came as Dell and others prepare to inaugurate a new supercomputer, Stampede, in Texas on March 27. What's noteworthy about Pangea, however, is that it will be the most powerful supercomputer owned and used by private industry; the vast majority of such systems are in use by government agencies and academic institutions. Right now, the most powerful private supercomputer for commercial use is the Hermit supercomputer in Stuttgart; ranked 27th in the world, the 831.4 Tflop machine is a public-private partnership between the University of Stuttgart and hww GmbH. Panega, which will cost 60 million Euro ($77.8 million) over four years, will assist decision-making in the exploration of complex geological areas and to increase the efficiency of hydrocarbon production in compliance with the safety standards and with respect for the environment, Total said. Pangea will be will be stored at Total's research center in the southwestern French city of Pau."
Try again editors, leave your geek card at the door.
2.3 gigaflops is faster than 831 tflops?
Panega or Pangea?
2.3 gigaflops is on most everyone's desktop today. Maybe you mean 2.3 teraflops?
If they really want to destroy the planet the fastest through global warming, go build a shitload of limestone quarries, and then dump the limestone in rivers. I'm sure they could get us to Venus levels in a couple of decades.
This has to be 2.3 *peta* FLOPS not giga FLOPS. For instance, in 2010, an Intel desktop processor could do 109 gigaFLOPS (reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS).
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
So.... why are we wasting the most powerful computer on non renewable sources of energy?
Hunting for big oil just seems... wrong. Why cant we use this computer to find cures, track the stars, simulate atoms?
Will the public have access to the results (thinking property values) or will it only be available to a select few?
Wait a second...
Shouldn't that be 2.3 petaflops?
Except for that 600 petaFLOP private supercomputer for commercial use which also happens to be the most powerful computer ever constructed by mankind for any purpose.
Its almost as fast as my mobile phone!
I bet cold-pressed humans are a wonderful source of hydrocarbons.
Quite an impressive system in general terms, 2.3PF without accelerators says a lot about the size of this machine (48 racks):
"Pangea is manufactured by SGI, built on the ICE-X platform. In a video, Total said that each blade contains four Xeon processors (most likely the E5-2600, which SGI uses), each with 32 cores and 128 Gbytes of RAM. Each M-Rack contains 72 blades, for a total of 288 processors, 2304 cores, and 9 TB of RAM. An M-Cell contains four M-Racks and 2 C-Racks for 288 blades, 1,152 processors, 9,216 cores, and 32 TB of RAM. In all, 12 M-Cells are used, with 110,592 cores, 442 TB of RAM, and 120 km of fiber-optic cable connecting it all up. Pangea also includes 12 bays, with 600 1-TB drives each, and 4 petabytes of magnetic tape for archiving data."
A system of this size with accelerators would exceed easily 10PF, although I am not sure whether the particular workload to be ran on this beast would be suitable for any kind of accelerators (anybody has an idea on that?). Now I have a question: what is TACC going to do with so many Xeon Phi accelerators not delivering the promised performance? Will intel provide them with the second generation of MICs for free or will that upgrade cost another big chunk of taxpayers money?
X.
Oil and gas?! How about Solar? Wind? GeoThermal? LFTR/Thorium? Why are we blowing computer power on dying industries!?
What is this?! The Freakin' Flintstones?!
How can sole number crunching power find the actual oil/gas reservoirs?
Is it a Gibson?
Does it have a backdoor using the password 'god' ?
And they want to put their shit in it? No.
Your right to toxify your environment ends where my environment begins.
we already know about far more oil reserves then we can wisely burn. finding more is only going to make things worse.
Every once in a while, I hear of an owner taking their company's new toy and having a little fun with it. I wish I owned this company just so I could run WCG or Folding@Home on it for a week.
Maybe I could sneak in and add a WCG daemon. I wouldn't be stealing resources, just.. liberating.. idle.. ones.
If we colonize Mars, it won't be the World Wide Web anymore. UWW?
so we aren't curing cancer, aids, or mapping out the allocation of resources for all of humanity to share..
but OIL.. that's the meaning of life brah
I noticed they will not be using it to find ways to conserve energy.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
The obligatory Beowolf cluster line from soo many years ago on /.
Big freaking deal if the code is buggy, and hard to use.
Nope, this computer's going to find more sources of fossil carbon, yaaaay. :-(
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
In the summary's defense, the article calls it by both names multiple times. I question an article that has the subject spelled more than one way. I can absolutely accept speech, comments and the like having some errors. They are at least real-time. But I assume the writer worked on this piece for more than the time it took to type it.
reinvested to build a supercomputer placing 9th...
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/frances-total-gets-oil-price-profit-boost
Very smart way to spend that money even though I'm not a big fan of hydrocarbons. I'm really curious how hard was it to justify for Board Members?
There are actually quite a few of these big machines. Most of them in Houston, but some in Europe. Every major Oil Company and Every large Seismic company has one. They are all huge, and I have never seen on of them shut down to run benchmarks, and most folks don't externally advertise their existence. The cost too much and they have too much backlog and will never appear on a bullshit benchmark web page reserved for underutilized supercomputers. To the person asking if these are overkill? No, The folks referencing the RTM, FWI etc have hit the equations on the head. One processing job may take 6 + months to run a single migration using 20,000 + cpus. They run all kinds of cpus' gpu's and change out masses of them every time there is a step change in a chip for efficiency. If they had chips 100 times more powerful, they have equations waiting for them. with regards to the person or people talking about carbon ending it all etc.. These machines enable the reservoir engineers to target more reservoirs and then deplete these reservoirs more efficiently leaving less hydrocarbon behind (theoretically reducing the number of dry wells) We will never run out of oil, we will however run out of the technology to efficiently extract it from the ground. ( or it will become cost prohibitive) Carbon use however is another kettle of fish. Making hydrocarbon more expensive will only push coal back front. (look at china, germany etc) Until use is addressed, alternative will be what they could be. Doing things like shooting ourselves in the foot with ethanol is a good way not to proceed though
I know that the fossil fuel industry is narrowly focused on finding more hydrocarbons to burn since they can count these as assets and run up their stock price, but there is growing consensus among climate scientists (not deniers) that we can only burn about one third of the hydrocarbons that we have already discovered if we are to avoid climate catastrophe.
It would be nice if raw greed didn't run the world. However, reality will intrude sooner or later and all of these new discoveries will become worthless.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
What is the Government doing with such powerful supercomputers?....
I'm sure it isn't Pong.
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
Tourettes guy lives on!
...Panega. Its purpose: to seek out new life and new civilizations...
What's sad is the ego of people that think making the TOP500 counts for something, or that those participating in that little site's stats are the whole world of large-scale computing, or that other entries that could make that list even bother calling themselves "Supercomputers" rather than just "hey we have a shit-ton of generic linux nodes running MPI stuff". I worked at a relatively small private company in the same industry as Total (doing seismic exploration for oil/gas) 10 years ago and they had a Linux cluster that would've made the "Top 10" on that list at the time and never bothered to call it that or care. I don't think we were that unique at the time. Lots of companies in this field build very cheap gargantuan clusters from off-the-shelf no-name Linux server/blade vendors and scale them out to the extreme. A 20K+ node datacenter (where a node is 4-8 cores) wired up with fiber and running MPI cluster stuff is just everyday stuff in that industry.
Generally people don't build such large homogeneous systems. More like a few thousand nodes now and more in a few months. Benchmarking a warehouse w/ 20,000 nodes doesn't mean much if they're of several vintages which is usually the case. There's a lot of jockeying for how many racks you can get for a job. So I'm a little skeptical of 6+ months w/ 20,000+ cores for a single run. The push back from other customers would get pretty fierce.
As for why. I rode home on the bus w/ a guy who was subsea systems manager for a major field in 8000 ft of water in GoM. Subsea tieback, so no platform. All he was doing was specifying and purchasing the bits and pieces that will sit on the sea floor. He had a $2 billion US budget. How many machinists and welders do you have to employ to spend that much? So spending $10 million for a system dedicated to a single project at startup is not unreasonable.
As BP learned the hard way, making a mistake is even more expensive.
FWIW Actual throughput achievable depends a lot on the particular algorithm and who coded it. But many algorithms are trivially parallel, so the killer is usually cache bandwidth and organization.
You know, those computers they use to look for oil and stuff?
If Pangea is not a series of transparent cubes with lightning flashing between them, I shall be disappointed.
'nuff said.
The cleaner and faster we can find such minerals, the better....
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
The post just lifts the first four paragraphs of TFA and randomly adds in misspellings of its subject.
Personally I feel uncomfortable with the lack of even a slight attempt to summarize, unless you count deleting carriage returns.
... especially if it's not there.