Massive supercomputer used in the search for oil

Fuel Fix: 

BP opened a new computing center on Tuesday that is home to what the oil giant calls the world’s largest supercomputer for commercial research, part of BP’s efforts to more quickly analyze scans of underground rocks, the company said.

The processing power at the Houston facility — part of BP’s five-year, $100 million investment in computing — was developed with help from HP and Intel, BP said.

Computing power has played a critical role in helping oil companies identify and produce oil from the largest reserves ever discovered in the Gulf of Mexico. New methods of producing seismic images of reservoirs beneath the ocean produce mountains of data that can take weeks to process. Advances in computing, both in the software used to manage the data and in the processing capabilities of the machines, have pushed the oil industry into an era of major growth in offshore oil production.

BP’s newest supercomputer has 1,000 terabytes of memory and 23.5 petabytes of disk space, the equivalent of the disk space in 40,000 laptop computers, BP said in a news release.

Its new computing center will have 2.2 petaflops of processing speed. One petaflop of processing power has the ability to conduct 1,000 trillion calculations per second, the company said.
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That the facility is in Houston and not in their UK base tells you where the energy capitol of the world is located.   These computers are able to analyze data and present the geologist with a graphic picture of the layers beneath the Gulf that make it much easier to find commercial quantities of oil and gas.   It has taken much of the guess work out of the process.