BP says it has "more than doubled the total computing power of its Centre for High-Performance Computing (CHPC) in Houston, making it the most powerful supercomputer in the world for commercial research."
'The company says that "increased computing power, speed and storage reduce the time needed to analyse large amounts of seismic data to support exploration, appraisal and development plans as well as other research and technology developments throughout BP."
Ahmed Hashmi, BP’s head of upstream technology said: “Our investment in supercomputing is another example of BP leading the way in digital technologies that deliver improved safety, reliability and efficiency across our operations and give us a clear competitive advantage."
The Centre for High-Performance Computing "provides critical support to BP's upstream business segment, where it serves as the worldwide hub for research computing," with "BP’s computer scientists and mathematicians at the CHPC" enabling "industry breakthroughs in advanced seismic imaging and rock physics research to help with reservoir modelling."
{loadposition alex08}BP says its downstream business "is also using the supercomputer for fluid dynamic research to study hydrocarbon flows at refineries and pipelines to improve operational safety."
The company is working with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Intel using HPE’s Apollo System and Intel’s Knights Landing processors, with the result that "the recent upgrade has boosted the processing speed of BP’s supercomputer from four petaflops to nine petaflops."
And what is a petaflop you ask? It is processing speed of "one thousand trillion floating point operations, or “flops,” per second."
BP's supercomputer has "a total memory of 1,140 terabytes (1.14 petabytes) and 30 petabytes of storage, the equivalent of over 500,000 iPhones."
Alain Andreoli, Senior VP and GM of HPE's Data Centre Infrastructure Group said: “With the expansion and new systems in place, BP will be able to further bolster its capabilities to accurately process and manage vast amounts of seismic data to identify new business opportunities and improve operational efficiency."
Since the CHPC opened in 2013, BP notes having "quadrupled its computing power and doubled its storage capacity and plans to continue expanding its computing capability in 2018."
The company also provided the following background info:
- The CHPC is now 18 times more powerful than the fastest supercomputer 10 years ago, which had a computing power of 0.48 petaflops.
- In April 2017, BP announced that a proprietary algorithm using Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) technology run through the CHPC helped to find an additional 200 million barrels of resources at BP’s Atlantis field in the Gulf of Mexico.
- Applied to BP’s four existing hubs in the Gulf of Mexico, seismic imaging with FWI has identified an estimated additional 1 billion barrels of oil in place.
- By retiring older systems with new technology, the CHPC has been able to stay at existing power consumption levels delivering improved cost effectiveness.
