British Petroleum (BP) has opened a new facility in Houston which claimed to house world’s largest supercomputer for commercial research.
The new facility will have a memory of 1000 terabytes and disk space of 23.5petabytes and help in analysing massive quantities of seismic data and enabling more detailed in-house modeling of rock formations before drilling begins.
The three-story 110,000ft² building will help the company in processing and managing global seismic imaging data and strengthen its oil and natural gas exploration capabilities.
BP Upstream Technology head Jackie Mutschler said, "BP’s investment in this new supercomputing center not only highlights the increasingly high-tech nature of today’s global oil and gas industry, it underscores our company’s long-held belief in the vital role technology plays and will continue to play in solving the world’s biggest energy challenges."
The Center for High-Performance Computing is expected to reduce energy consumption and complement future growth.
The building replaces BP’s previous supercomputing complex, which had been located within an office tower at the campus and had achieved petaflop processing speed, which can perform one thousand trillion calculations per second.
BP worked with HP and Intel to boost its computing power to over 2.2 petaflops and will help the company in development of "digital rocks," a technology for calculating petrophysical rock properties and modeling fluid flow directly from high-resolution 3D images – at a scale equivalent to 1/50th of the thickness of a human hair.
