Linux Clusters Target Oil & Gas Applications
As an industry, hydrocarbon exploration and production operates in an increasingly challenging environment. The new challenges include more than high risk and high capital commitments, or declining fields and complex operations. Unconventional plays have become conventional. It is not enough to be creative, aggressive and technically adroit. One also wants to be smart. The good news is that smart is a lot cheaper than it used to be.
Specifically, high performance computers (HPCs) are a lot less expensive than they used to be, and a lot more powerful. The fastest computer in the world, Blue Gene/L, runs at nearly 300 teraflops, or 300 trillion floating point operations per second. The real revolution is that regular computer servers have become HPCs through parallel architectures, increasing industrial and market penetration.
A small cluster of Linux boxes -- 32 regular servers -- now outperforms the world's fastest computers from only a few years ago at 1/100th of the cost. They also are compact and easily serviced. A 128-cluster computer would take only three or four racks, easily fitting in a kitchen. These machines, the "big iron" of the world, have become readily available and powerful tools to tackle tough exploration, drilling and production problems.
Thunder Linux cluster at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). It is an 18-teraflop machine with more than 1,000 nodes and 4,000 central processing units, and ranks as the 11th fastest computer in the world. However, Thunder is about to be surpassed by an even faster and more powerful cluster system.
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