IBM BUILDS LINUX SUPERCOMPUTER TO SPEED THE SEARCH FOR OIL.IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) has announced that a major seismic acquisition, processing, and reservoir imaging firm has selected a powerful IBM Linux supercomputer to substantially increase its ability to assist oil companies in their search for new oil reserves Oil reserves refer to portions of oil in place that are claimed to be recoverable under economic constraints. Oil in the ground is not a "reserve" unless it is claimed to be economically recoverable, since as the oil is extracted, the cost of recovery increases incrementally hidden deep beneath the earth's surface Noun 1. Earth's surface - the outermost level of the land or sea; "earthquakes originate far below the surface"; "three quarters of the Earth's surface is covered by water" surface . The supercomputer will power WesternGeco's sophisticated seismic imaging system and will be comprised of a cluster of 256 IBM eServer This article is about the IBM family of computer servers. For the open access electronic text archive, see EServer.org. IBM eServer was a family of computer servers from IBM Corporation. systems, all running Linux. With the high cost of oil exploration, particularly the drilling effort, dry holes are not an option. That is why more companies are turning to sophisticated methods of seismic imaging that allow scientists to create detailed 3D maps of hidden oil and gas reservoirs before drilling starts. "The use of IBM systems running Linux has greatly expanded our ability to provide oil companies with detailed images, or to assist oil companies in imaging potential drill sites," said Trevor Gatus, data processing data processing or information processing, operations (e.g., handling, merging, sorting, and computing) performed upon data in accordance with strictly defined procedures, such as recording and summarizing the financial transactions of a manager of WesternGeco's Houston Land Processing Center. "With excellent performance, we are now able to more fully utilize our most technically demanding imaging routines to assist oil companies with their oil exploration efforts." WesternGeco is not alone in its use of seismic imaging. As evidence of the technology's growing popularity, in 1989 only five percent of wells drilled in the Gulf of Mexico Noun 1. Gulf of Mexico - an arm of the Atlantic to the south of the United States and to the east of Mexico Golfo de Mexico Atlantic, Atlantic Ocean - the 2nd largest ocean; separates North and South America on the west from Europe and Africa on the east were based on seismic imaging. By 1996, that figure swelled to nearly 80 percent. Today, seismic imaging precedes virtually all drilling expeditions. xSeries-based Linux clusters are highly scalable from 4 to 1024 processors and can be fully adapted to meet the high performance needs of the petroleum market. Linked by a fast network, the clusters can be easily managed from a single point of control and can act as either a single machine or a multiple node system. The cluster at WesternGeco is comprised of 256 eServer xSeries 330 systems, each powered by two 933 MHz (MegaHertZ) One million cycles per second. It is used to measure the transmission speed of electronic devices, including channels, buses and the computer's internal clock. A one-megahertz clock (1 MHz) means some number of bits (16, 32, 64, etc. Intel Pentium III processors. "Even with the best techniques available, oil is difficult to find," said Dave Turek, vice president, Linux emerging technologies, IBM. "Petroleum companies need to do everything they can to stack the odds in their favor when making million-dollar decisions on where to drill. "Through the use of high-performance Linux clusters, companies like WesternGeco can image more area in less time." |
|
||||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion