Friday, February 17, 2017

ExxonMobil Sets High Performance Computing Record

Spring, Texas-based oil and gas giant ExxonMobil said on Thursday, that the company has set a record in the high performance computing (HPC) market, in a joint effort with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). ExxonMobil said that, it has demonstrated the use of 716,800 computer processors with proprietary software, used for complex oil and gas reservoir simulation models. ExxonMobil said it used the NCSA's Blue Waters system for the massively parallel computing system. The oil and gas industry is well known for its heavy use of high performance computing, supercomputers, and other computing resources for the complex calculations needed for simulating oil and gas reservoirs. ExxonMobil said the run resulted in results that were "thousands of time faster" than existing industry reservoir simulations. The data from those simulatios are used by oil and gas companies to make decisionson well placement, as well as facility design and to minimize environmental risks.