ENTERTAINMENT

In a global effort to extract the greatest value from subsurface oil and gas reservoirs, the Exploration and Production Branch at French energy giant Total recently expanded its already extensive capabilities provided by servers and storage solutions from Silicon Graphics. The move is expected to allow Total to maximize its return on drilling investments made throughout the world by strategically approaching each discovery for optimal output. With the June deployment of six additional SGI® Altix® servers, 48 more terabytes of SGI InfiniteStorage at Total's technical center in Pau, France, researchers can simultaneously conduct detailed seismic analysis on more drilling opportunities. The new resources allow the Pau facility to better help Total's 44 exploration and production subsidiaries confidently identify and develop onshore and offshore oil and gas prospects. Total uses reservoir simulation applications and seismic analysis applications to generate a digital image of the subsurface structure of the prospect or field under evaluation. With the latest acquisition, Total geophysicists and reservoir engineers can leverage one of the world's largest commercial installations of SGI Altix systems. Each of Total's six new SGI Altix 3000 systems is powered by 64 Intel Itanium processors, each with 8GB of system memory. The new servers tap 48 terabytes of SGI InfiniteStorage TP9500 storage via a storage area network (SAN), with the SGI InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS and SGI InfiniteStorage Data Migration Facility (DMF) providing access to another 100 terabytes of previously installed storage. The CXFS SAN provides instant data sharing for increased productivity among the company's existing installation of Altix servers. "As a consequence of a policy of continuous implementation of additional Itanium processors, Total is today working on one of the most powerful computers in the world," said Jacques Delvaux, Seimic Processing Dpt Deputy Manager at Total. "By deliberately choosing to implement industry-standard technologies, Total has chosen a platform optimized for performance and agility. And extending our investment in SGI storage and visualization solutions gives us optimal flexibility in accessing, visualizing, and managing up to 2 petabytes of seismic data on current and future drilling prospects. With this latest acquisition, we are enhancing our own technology and economic leadership, both of which are critical in the very highly competitive petroleum research market." "Total is using leading-edge technology to extend its competitive edge well into the future," said Tom Garrison, Intel Director of Enterprise Solutions and Marketing for EMEA. "By deploying SGI servers based on the Intel Itanium processor, Total acquires the ability to run complex simulations requiring large amounts of memory at a great price/performance." Energy Industry Needs are Escalating With data sets commonly surpassing 10 terabytes in size, the energy industry increasingly depends on advanced analysis and visualization of data assets, along with the ability to leverage the expertise of individuals scattered across the globe, to make informed investment and management decisions about oil and gas discovery and production. SGI offers the energy industry a combination of technologies that no other vendor can match. -- Compute. SGI Altix leverages the built-in SGI NUMAflex architecture, which dramatically reduces the time and resources required to run technical applications by managing extremely large data sets in a single, system-wide, shared-memory space. For the first time, more complex data sets and complete workflows can be driven entirely out of memory, enabling productivity breakthroughs that traditional clusters or enterprise-class UNIX(R) servers can't achieve. -- Storage. The pairing of CXFS with DMF provides localized data centers with the bandwidth and storage capacity they need to accelerate workflow by efficiently processing and storing huge data sets. CXFS allows data to be shared between globally dispersed data centers at high bandwidth, without resorting to copying, thereby avoiding countless hours in lost productivity. With DMF, energy companies can dramatically and cost-effectively scale storage capacity without sacrificing the ability to access archived data rapidly. -- Visualization. In seismic processing and reservoir modeling, SGI visualization solutions can save energy companies millions of dollars through improvements in accuracy of well placement and significantly increase balance sheet assets by increasing known recoverable reserves. By combining support for memory sizes greater than 128GB, unparalleled computational power and world-leading graphics processors, SGI delivers an unbeatable resource capable of meeting the demands posed by increasingly complex field exploration and the expectation of increasingly efficient exploitation. At SEG 2004, SGI will demonstrate its acclaimed compute, storage and visualization solutions in Booth 2006 of the Colorado Convention Center Oct. 10-13 in Denver.