HPCwire: HP Cluster Meets Demands of Oil Exploration Simulations

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October 13, 2006

HP Cluster Meets Demands of Oil Exploration Simulations

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The world's fourth largest oil and gas company, Total, generates some impressive figures. It has 95,000 employees, operates in more than 130 countries, runs 17,000 service stations and sells some 3.9 million barrels of oil a day, generating recent annual sales income of $143.2 billion. Total's operation spans the entire oil and gas chain from refining and marketing to crude oil and petroleum product trading and shipping. However, none of this would be possible without the crucial upstream activities of prospecting and exploration. Researchers at Total E&P UK in Scotland are constantly seeking and evaluating new fields in the North Sea.

Oil exploration is an expensive and high-risk operation and if geologists get it wrong, it can have disastrous financial consequences. Finding new hydrocarbon reservoirs and then correctly establishing what they will produce and how they should be worked is critical to Total's ongoing success.

Total E&P UK, the company's UK exploration and production organization based in Aberdeen, plays a major part in ensuring that Total can continue to profit from its lucrative North Sea oilfields. Computer simulation is key to this, and for Total the huge computational demands of these simulations are being met by a high performance cluster of HP servers running Red Hat Linux.

"We use reservoir simulation as a significant part of our business and it helps us make some key decisions on where we drill, what we drill and the production methods we use," says Dave Ibbotson, head of IT architecture and systems at Total E&P. "We take the known facts about a reservoir and then we add assumptions about its performance. We can put in information about the type of well we are going to drill into that reservoir and we can simulate the impact that this will have on the production of hydrocarbons from the reservoir. These simulations can take anything from hours to days, so we are always looking at ways to reduce the time it takes to run them and make the commercially critical decisions that define Total's profitability."

Linux speed

"These applications will just use all the processing power that you can throw at them so using clusters offers a significant improvement in performance," adds Ibbotson. "In the production environment, we used to have eight older Dell Pentium workstation machines working together as a cluster and it was time to look at how we could improve performance. HP provide all our servers and we have a good relationship so when we were looking at upgrading and moving from a workstation to a server-based environment, we naturally spoke to HP as our preferred supplier."

HP put Total in touch with its specialist partner, OCSL, who sent a team to Aberdeen to define what was required and then designed and built a high performance solution. This was based on HP Proliant Opteron servers and includes one HP ProLiant DL385 headnode and eight HP ProLiant DL145 processing nodes linked by a Gigabit backbone attached to an Ethernet network serving just the cluster and running Linux.

"Choosing Linux was, again, because of performance," adds Ibbotson. "The performance of Red Hat Linux in this kind of environment, compared to UNIX or Windows, is as different as night and day. The benchmarks we have run suggest that there is a 40 per cent improvement just based on Linux alone."

Researchers in Total's Aberdeen office work closely with manufacturers and vendors to constantly reevaluate the simulation software, mainly Schlumberger.

"Because of the type of testing our research guys get involved in, they test the cluster to the extreme, crashing the servers as part and parcel of the business so it is important that we can rebuild them very quickly," says Ibbotson. "This ability for quick rebuild was part of the design spec and that is what OCSL has provided for us by developing scripting on Red Hat Linux."

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