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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."
2.3 gigaflops is on most everyone's desktop today. Maybe you mean 2.3 teraflops?
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"
When I saw "Panega", my first thought was "For a geological supercomputer, that's a nice pun on Pangea, isn't it?" Well, then I noticed that it's not a pun, just a typo. ;-)
Ezekiel 23:20
That's because there is plenty of food. The problem is political, not technical or economic.
I couldn't care less about that nonsense. I'm waiting for the day they use this system to hunt humans. Dissenters, etc...
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
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?!
Seismic imaging. Imagine solving a wave equation (acoustic, elastic, or worse) over a 3D grid many kilometers on a side with grid spacing on the order of meters. Imagine you're doing it with a strong high-order finite-difference code. Calculate for tens of thousands of timesteps. Now repeat that entire thing thousands of times for a given full survey.
No matter how much computer you have, it's never nearly enough for seismic imaging.
In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it. -John Archibald Wheeler
Processing Seismic Data takes a ton of power, There are techniques that are well known that we still can't use due to the lack of computer power. The last big advance was RTM(Reverse Time Migration). This was first done on 2D Data in the 80's, But didn't become reasonable to do on 3D's until about 2008-'09. This improvement in imaging is one of the drivers is subsalt exploration. The next big step is FWI (Full Waveform Inversion) We still don't have enough power to run this mainstream yet, The main idea is the stuff we mute out as noise is actually just data that we can migrate back to the original location. The other Item more power helps us with Is running Migrations at higher frequencies. right now we record at 250Hz(125 nyquest) but only process at 60Hz, This is mainly due to the price of computer time. doubling to 120Hz requires 4 times more computer time. But allows us to double our image resolution from to 50 meters to 25 meters. Considering some of our target reservoirs are as narrow as 20 feet, This type of thing is important.
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