Total Goes Petascale with SGI ICE X Supercomputer

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This week SGI announced that Total has selected the SGI ICE X technology for its new 2.3 Petaflop Pangea supercomputer. In what is described as the largest commercial HPC system in the world, Pangea will give Total’s in-house engineers and geologists an extremely powerful tool to enable the application of analytical and numerical models that support the development of three dimensional visualizations of underground geological formations, key to identifying potential deposits of oil and gas and to determining optimal extraction methods.

Total is committed to leveraging technological innovation and high performance computing to provide the best response to growing global energy demand,” said Philippe Malzac, CIO Exploration and Production for Total. “The efficiency of the SGI ICE X system, which represents high computational power using a minimal amount of energy, gives Total the smallest footprint and lowest TCO possible. This was a key factor in our selection of SGI ICE X for the Pangea system.”

To maximize energy efficiency, Total selected an innovative water-cooled SGI ICE X solution based on its M-Cell design. M-Cells utilize closed-loop airflow and warm-water cooling to create embedded hot-aisle containment, thereby lowering overall cooling requirements and significantly reducing overall energy consumption as compared to traditional HPC designs. The 2.3 PFlop system is based on the Intel Xeon E5-2670 processor that consists of 110,592 cores and contains 442 terabytes of memory. The data management solution for seven petabytes of storage includes SGI InfiniteStorage 17000 disk arrays, SGI DMF tiered storage virtualization, and a Lustre file system integrated by SGI professional services.

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