Schlumberger was showing off some new technology at the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (EAGE) this month (a full report to appear in next month’s Oil IT Journal). The new solution provides full bandwidth graphics running on a single machine in both Linux and Microsoft Windows. Thus a user of both GeoFrame and Petrel can have simultaneous windows open on both applications at the same time.
The technology stack begins with Intel’s new virtualization technology for directed—a new feature of Intel Xeon 5500 CPU. The demo machine was the new HP Z800 Workstation which includes NVIDIA SLI multi-OS enabled Quadro FX graphics cards along with the new Intel chip. The enabling virtualization technology is Parallels’ Workstation 4.0 Extreme that allows for full resolution graphics in both environments. Schlumberger’s Russ Sagert said, ‘our engineers were blown away by the performance of this system even under extreme workloads that stressed every aspect of the system.’
Curiously the EAGE demo, spectacular as it is, also served to underline interoperability issues at the Linux/Windows divide. Data exchange between the two applications is by file transfer! Things might get more interesting with OpenSpirit running on the Z800.
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