Speaking at the 2020 Huawei Oil and Gas Summit, located notionally in Johannesburg, but actually in the ether, someplace between China and the Middle East, Zhang Tiegang (Huawei Oil & Gas) presented on the use of the hybrid cloud in oil and gas. Huawei’s hybrid cloud sets out to help companies with the migration of their data centers to the cloud and to satisfy the ever-increasing storage requirements of seismic exploration and reservoir management.
Huawei addresses challenges in cloud data center construction such as the difficulty and cost of migrating services to the cloud, the high network bandwidth needed to run applications, and issues of tenancy with confidential business data restricted by laws and regulations, as well as internal policy. Self-built private cloud projects can represent huge investment and long time frames, all in the face of a general reduction in IT investment.
By ‘co-building’ a cloud data center companies can benefit from on-demand configuration of computing and storage devices, independent deployment of professional application software, secure backup and ‘unified archiving and management of result data’.
With the cloud in place, companies then can build a subsurface cognition system and scientific decision-making systems based on collected data and multi-disciplinary 3D geological models, laying the foundation for intelligent oilfields. PetroChina’s own brand GeoEast seismic processing package got a plug in this context as did Schlumberger’s flagship Intersect reservoir simulator. The future will see intelligent oil and gas fields with reduced labor intensity thanks to automation and ‘full lifecycle management of oil and gas fields’.
Huawei Saudi Arabia’s Feras Al-Sarraj presented the OceanStor storage offering for oil and gas. OceanStor is said to be fast, solid, converged and ‘intelligent’. The hardware is powered by Huawei in-house designed chips and algorithms and offers an ‘industry’s highest performance’ of 20 million IOPS and a ‘7 nines’ high availability (99.99999%). A ‘Customer X’ was cited as a reference for OceanStor’s use in seismics and reservoir modeling.
Huawei’s Wang Hao described how the company is ‘reshaping the oil and gas industry with AI, big data, the cloud and 5G technologies’. Leveraging work done for PetroChina, the company has expanded its HPC/cloud capabilities across an impressive client base of companies outside of North America. On the way it has picked up domain knowledge and now supports software from all the main upstream vendors (Schlumberger also presented its software portfolio at the Huawei event.)
Huawei’s offering includes OceanStor storage hardware, CPU/GPU clusters and a ‘full stack’ artificial intelligence offering from its chip-level Ascend CANN (compute architecture for neural networks) to a ‘HiAI’ branded AI engine and compute services. These have been leveraged by client Sonatrach in its ‘One Cloud’ strategy. The HiAi toolkit has been used to develop a knowledge graph/neural net for pay zone identification and a tool for pumping unit diagnostics using dynamometer card imagery. Another ‘Video Brain’ app has been deployed to spot site intrusion, HSE violation and assure safe operations. Huawei’s 5G-based IoT network has been deployed at one major EU port and at the ‘largest refinery in Europe’. More from the Summit home page.
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