Occidental Petroleum has deployed a 25-node cluster of 2-way HP Itanium 2 servers for reservoir simulation in its Qatar operations. Oxy was previously using Schlumberger’s Eclipse reservoir simulation software in a ‘proprietary RISC-based environment’. The company deemed that additional processing capacity was required to support higher model resolution and ‘greater predictive accuracy’.
Testing
Preliminary test work was conducted at the SIS Competency Center in Abingdon, U.K., followed by on-site performance testing at Occidental headquarters in Elk Hills, California. The solution offered faster simulation runs, improved scalability and reduced costs. Simulation results from the new system were said to ‘reduce reservoir uncertainty’.
Moore
Don Moore, Oxy VP and CIO said, ‘Eclipse Parallel optimized for Itanium 2 processors and Linux-based clusters sped up our reservoir simulations for multi-million cell reservoir models tenfold while reducing costs 4-5 times over traditional methods.’
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