Fall is in the air. It’s about now when attendees of SEG (Society of Exploration Geophysicists) Denver 2014 and SC14 in New Orleans are carefully reviewing conference programs, keynotes and exhibitor lists with the aim of prioritizing how time at these events could be best spent.
Industry participants attending these respective conferences do so to compare and contrast the news, new initiatives and capabilities – from pure science to practical use.
A handful of companies are not only exhibiting at these events but are also active in the field at the cutting edge of high performance computing (HPC) deployments with powerful stories to tell. These very exciting stories are critical for every HPC user because no matter what the application need might be, all of us share the same purpose, determination and need to extend HPC performance efficiency, gain faster results and at lower costs. Trade shows like these are an absolute must in accessing firsthand knowledge from the experts!
These very exciting stories are critical for every HPC user because no matter what the application need might be, everyone in this community shares the same purpose, determination and need to extend HPC performance efficiency, gain faster results and at lower costs. Trade shows like these are an absolute must in accessing firsthand knowledge from the experts!
Leading Commercial HPC Sites
Pop Quiz – Who do you think owns and operates some of world’s biggest privately held HPC sites?
Answer: Fortune 100 oil and gas organizations.
Through seismic processing these companies are demonstrating successes in large scale HPC site risk management, operational cost reduction and production level performance gains found in leveraging the intensive number-crunching power of today’s most extensive commercial supercomputers.
However, seismic processing comes with unique mission critical challenges requiring high reliability, efficient application productivity and fast use of the available data. For example, permits to acquire seismic data on new opportunities are available only for short periods of time. To make best use of the time allowed companies pre-process the data during the acquisition phase, which occurs at sea. This processing needs high reliability and fast HPC results to provide assurance that the data acquisition is confirmed to be 100% correct and with no data loss.
The industry is driving change across all aspects of data processing, which is synergized with new extraction and oil reservoir management methods.
If Only it Were a Needle in a Haystack
The challenge facing these users begins with the tomes of geophysical data that they must process and interpret, which is based on seismic processing surveys with 3D and 4D time lapse images taken thousands of feet below the earth’s surface. That’s right – oil and gas reserves move! Exploration is dynamic! It is not enough to see hydrocarbon reservoirs; geophysicists must accurately model what is going on underground to precisely determine site acquisition, opportunity assessment, and production monitoring. Using both newly acquired and archived (over the last 30 years) seismic data, exploration companies are creating visualizations and movies that simulate the movement of hydrocarbons within underground oil reservoirs. These complex, ground-breaking procedures had not been possible until recently.
Through the use of HPC exploration experts can now find, extract and manage productive use of world-wide supplies far beyond what was imagined. HPC underpins these processes and in doing so is tied to hundreds of billions and future trillions in revenue for continuous exploration, extraction, and production of these hydrocarbon energy resources.
It may be surprising for those outside the industry to learn that oil and gas, like many others, is comprised of a community constantly challenged to do more for less. In this case, seek elusive resources at deeper and deeper sea depths. However, among the back drop of growing competitive pressures, where time is everything, these companies are caught between two distinct pressure points:
1) Reduce costs and more conservatively manage working capital reserves
2) Expedite R&D and production investments that will yield maximum progress in exploration
HPC seismic processing is the only method to accomplish these real world commercial production goals, while also achieving all the other operating cost reduction challenges.
The net-result, geophysicists must efficiently process and store orders of magnitude increases in Petabytes of data on highly productive, cost effective and reliable HPC disk storage. As the data must be online and always available for processing, users can no-longer afford to offload data to tape. Further to this end are the needs for additional storage tiers, to help reduce costs as well as data connectivity and access between the seismic processing applications / systems and numerous Windows and Linux client workstations.
In the coming weeks we will share additional details about emerging markets, applications, HPC tools and capabilities companies and organizations are employing to achieve more supercomputing results in less time and lower cost.
Connect with Seagate at SEG Denver 2014 and/or SC14 in New Orleans
At SEG 2014 Denver CO, October 26-31, Seagate will be exhibiting in booth 102 and will be raffling off a GoPro Camera to registered visitors. At SC14 New Orleans LA, November 16-21, Seagate can be found in booth 3239, during which we will conduct daily drawings of Seagate products.
During both events Seagate looks forward to sharing details of our exciting and ground breaking customer stories. We encourage attendees to contact our team to schedule an appointment or stop by our booths during the events to see our live demos and booth presentations.
