A recent upgrade to Total’s ‘Pangea’ Pau, France-based supercomputer supplied by SGI (OITJ April 2015) sees its compute power rise from 2.3 to 6.7 petaflops. Storage capacity has also been increased, to 26 petabytes. According to the latest TOP500 chart of supercomputers worldwide, Pangea is now the fastest computer in the industry and ranks among the top 10 most powerful computers, public or private, worldwide in the TOP500 ranking*.
Arnaud Breuillac, president of Total Exploration & Production said, ‘We tripled Pangea’s computing power in just two years. In the era of big data, state-of-the-art, data-intensive computing brings us a competitive advantage. This power will help us to improve our performance and to reduce our costs.’
The system is principally used to support ‘next-generation’ seismic algorithms developed by Total’s researchers, used to image complex regions and to produce numerical simulations of fields, including 4D, time lapse seismics. Pangea requires 4.5 MW of power, and is used to heat Total’s offices in winter.
* The TOP500 list does not claim exhaustiveness. At last year’s Digital Energy event in Houston, Schlumberger reported an aggregate 26 petaflops of compute capacity in Houston.
© Oil IT Journal - all rights reserved.