New Total Supercomputer to Help Exploration

[thackney]

New Total Supercomputer to Help Exploration
https://www.rigzone.com/news/new_total_supercomputer_to_help_exploration-18-jun-2019-159096-article/

otal has brought its new Pangea III supercomputer online, boosting the group’s computing power to 31.7 petaflops (equivalent to 170,000 laptops combined) and tripling its storage capacity to 76 petabytes (equivalent to around 50 million HD movies).

The new supercomputer will enable Total to reduce geological risks in exploration and development, accelerate project maturation and delivery and increases the value of the company’s assets through optimized field operations, according to Arnaud Breuillac, Total’s president of exploration and production.

Total revealed that Pangea III’s “enhanced capabilities” will also extend to new applications within the group, such as molecular modeling to optimize refining processes or improve lubricants’ properties....

[thackney]

For comparison:

TOP500 Becomes a Petaflop Club for Supercomputers
https://www.top500.org/news/top500-becomes-a-petaflop-club-for-supercomputers/

...Two IBM-built supercomputers, Summit and Sierra, installed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, respectively, retain the first two positions on the list. Both derive their computational power from Power 9 CPUs and NVIDIA V100 GPUs. The Summit system slightly improved its HPL result from six months ago, delivering a record 148.6 petaflops, while the number two Sierra system remains unchanged at 94.6 petaflops.

The Sunway TaihuLight, a system developed by China’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, holds the number three position with 93.0 petaflops. It’s powered by more than 10 million SW26010 processor cores.

At number four is the Tianhe-2A (Milky Way-2A) supercomputer, developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou. It used a combination of Intel Xeon and Matrix-2000 processors to achieve an HPL result of 61.4 petaflops.

Frontera, the only new supercomputer in the top 10, attained its number five ranking by delivering 23.5 petaflops on HPL. The Dell C6420 system, powered by Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processors, is installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas.

At number six is Piz Daint, a Cray XC50 system installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Lugano, Switzerland. It’s equipped with Intel Xeon CPUs and NVIDIA P100 GPUs. Piz Daint remains the most powerful system in Europe.

Trinity, a Cray XC40 system operated by Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories improves its performance to 20.2 petaflops, which earns it the number seven position. It’s powered by Intel Xeon and Xeon Phi processors.

The AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI) is installed in Japan at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and is listed at number eight, delivering 19.9 petaflops. The Fujitsu-built system is equipped with Intel Xeon Gold processors and NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs....

[IsailedawayfromFR]

Geophysical Procession of Seismic has been required in Exploration for decades, and this processing demands one of the highest computational capacities of any industry due to the staggering amounts of data being manipulated.

As the major oil industry effort in the US is not toward exploration but unconventionals instead,  this country has lessened needs compared to decades ago.  However, the rest of the world has a lot of active exploration occurring, a lot of which processing is performed within the US.