Offshore staff
HOUSTON – BP has more than doubled the total computing power of its Center for High-Performance Computing (CHPC) in Houston, making it the most powerful supercomputer in the world for commercial research, the company claims.
The new capability of increased computing power, speed, and storage reduces the time BP takes to analyze large amounts of seismic data to support its exploration, appraisal and development programs, and other research and technology developments.
“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,” said Ahmed Hashmi, BP’s head of upstream technology.
The CHPC serves as the company’s worldwide hub for research computing, with computer scientists and mathematicians have achieved breakthroughs in advanced seismic imaging and rock physics research to assist reservoir modeling, BP claims.
The recent upgrade, performed with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Intel using HPE’s Apollo System and Intel’s Knights Landing processors, boosted the processing speed of BP’s supercomputer from four to nine petaflops. One petaflop of processing speed is 1,000 trillion floating point operations, or “flops,” per second.
The supercomputer has a total memory of 1,140 terabytes (1.14 petabytes) and 30 petabytes of storage.
Since the CHPC opened in 2013, BP has quadrupled its computing power and doubled its storage capacity and plans further growth of its computing capability in 2018.
12/19/2017
