Some of the world’s largest exploration and production companies say the big bets they have placed on high-performance computing over the past several years are set to pay off. Their confidence is bolstered by the increasing capacity of the supercomputers they have built to interpret massive amounts of seismic and geophysical data that would have been nearly impossible to properly analyze using computers considered state-of-the-art only a decade ago.
And as a result of the major advancements being made each year in computing technology, the industry’s reliance on computer science continues to increase as it earns its place alongside the hallmark upstream disciplines of geoscience and engineering. Several of the companies making significant investments in high-performance computing talked about the promise that this technology holds for their exploration strategies at IPTC.
Total established itself as one of the leaders in this realm last March with the startup of a high-performance computer that it is using for seismic data imaging and to maximize future production by simulating how water, oil, and gas flow inside reservoirs. Called Pangea, the computer is capable of a processing speed of 2.3 petaflops, or 2.3 quadrillion computations per second, making it the 14th fastest computer ever built and the industry’s clear leader in terms of raw data crunching power. The company has committed more than USD 21.5 million to the project, which is 15 times faster than Total’s last supercomputer built just 5 years earlier. “We are particularly proud of this leap forward,” said Yves-Louis Darricarrère, upstream president at Total. “To keep meeting our needs, Pangea’s power will be doubled by around 2015.”
Late last year, Eni joined the petaflop club when it turned on its new supercomputer at its Green Data Centre in Ferrera Erbognone, Italy. The computer is actually a cluster of computers that uses thousands of processing units and computational accelerators to support the company’s upstream activities. “The application of high-performance computing has now become a must in geophysics,” said Roberto Dall’Omo, senior vice president of research and technological innovation at Eni.
Dall’Omo added that the company is doubling the computer’s 1.5 petaflop capacity by May. The system will be used to run “leading edge” 3D seismic imaging software and advanced modeling algorithms. Geophysicists and engineers will have access to the system from anywhere around the world via remote Internet access.
Gavin Wall, vice president of geoscience at ExxonMobil, told attendees at a panel session on upstream technology that his company is on the verge of “fundamental breakthroughs” that will be achieved through high-performance computing. He used the advent of ultradeepwater drilling and the record-breaking production of oil and gas from tight rock and shale formations in North America as positive examples of what can be accomplished when technological advancements are applied successfully. But looking into the future, Wall imagines scenarios that he said he would have considered out-of-hand just a few years ago. “Imagine, if you will, a reservoir engineer flying home from a trip at 30,000 ft sending simulation parameters to a computer halfway around the world and seeing the results of multiple million cell simulations before being served dinner,” he said. “Imagine, too, a drilling engineer simulating the behavior of individual cutting fragments in a wellbore to drill a record-breaking well before it is drilled in order to achieve success.
“This is not a vision for future generations, or at the margins of our industry. Today, we are harnessing high-performance computing to drive paradigm shifts in our capabilities in the core pillars of our business, and we’re already seeing those results.”
Wall said that the leaps being made in computing power will make seismic data an even more effective tool for reducing the risk of exploration and improving an operator’s ability to enhance production. While only a fraction of the sound waves produced in a seismic survey are recorded, the data that is collected is still too complex for most computers to process. But, in the coming years, the recent advancements made in high-performance computing are expected to usher in a new era of seismic imaging.
Among the technologies that Wall believes will be fully enabled by high-performance computing is a seismic system called full waveform inversion (FWI). First developed in the 1980s, FWI seeks to increase the accuracy of seismic modeling, but the sheer volume of the data involved has made it unfeasible for many years. “Now, FWI can deliver high-resolution rock property volumes in a matter of weeks—a feat that not too long ago, we estimated would take tens of thousands of years to achieve, even on the world’s fastest computer,” Wall said.
