Saudi Aramco has ported its mission-critical seismic data processing application to a cluster of 1,800 Intel processors. The new solution, which has boosted throughput by many folds and is expected to grow to a cluster of 4,000 by year-end, has enabled Saudi Aramco to identify and tap new reserves faster, more efficiently and at a lower price.
Accelerating the detection of oil and gas supplies is critical for Saudi Aramco, which has discovered and oversees one-quarter of the world’s conventional oil reserves. The company continually explores for new reserves by collecting vast amounts of seismic data from sound waves it sends through the ground to reveal the geological layout deep below the earth’s surface. This data, which is enhanced through a set of compute-intensive algorithms known as Prestack Time Migration (PSTM), is used to create 2D and 3D images of oil and gas targets.
“This is a mission-critical application,” said Mohammad Huwaidi, exploration systems analyst and application team leader for deploying the PSTM on the PC-Cluster at Saudi Aramco. “It does some of the most important work in our business.”
With its data volumes doubling each year, Saudi Aramco had to ensure its PSTM application could grow quickly, efficiently and cost effectively to meet its escalating seismic data processing needs and to maintain its world leadership position. Unconvinced of price vs. performance of other existing platforms it was using, Saudi Aramco worked with IBM to explore using Intel processors instead. The result was a highly scaleable and affordable cluster of 128 Intel Pentium III processors, which quickly grew to 1,800 processors as the company validated performance and reliability. And the cluster is still expanding.
“By the end of the year, we’ll have close to 4,000 Intel CPUs performing Prestack Time Migration,” Huwaidi said. “We’ve built the fastest yet least expensive PSTM system. The stability is good and getting better with time, and our ability to rapidly and inexpensively add computing power to our cluster is a major benefit of the Intel platform.”
During two days of intensive programming, Intel Solution Services assisted with the optimization of the PSTM code, which is installed on the 1800-processor cluster located at Saudi Aramco’s Exploration Building in Dhahran.
“We were able to get the PSTM application to run at least 33 percent faster on the same Intel Chip,” explained Gernot Hoyler, Intel Solution Services in Munich. “And with additional tuning, we hope to boost performance by 50 percent.”
John Woodget, Director of Computing and Solutions Marketing, Intel EMEA, commented: “Using Intel processors, Saudi Aramco has built a high performance computing cluster that is fast, stable, flexible and affordable. The solution’s superior scaleability and price-performance ensures that Saudi Aramco can grow its PSTM cluster to meet its future requirements. By deploying Intel-based systems, Saudi Aramco is benefiting from open, standards-based technologies that make it easier to adapt and rebuild its infrastructure as its needs change.”
Saudi Aramco’s PSTM application runs on a cluster of 900 IBM rack mounted 1U nodes, each with two 1.4GHz Intel Pentium III GHz processors with 2GB of memory. The operating system is RedHat Linux 7.2 and the cluster interconnect is 100MB Fast Ethernet.
Arab News Compunet 24 December 2002
