Woodside Powers Up Moordiup Supercomputer for Oil & Gas Exploration

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Woodside’s subsurface technology chief scientist, Tom Ridsdill-Smith, with the initial Moordiup build.

Over at ITnews, Ry Crozier writes that Woodside Energy in Australia is building a $500k supercomputer to help oil and gas exploration efforts. Powered by Intel Xeon processors with 880 cores, the supercomputer has been named Moordiup, an Aboriginal word meaning ‘fast’.

It is initially going to be put through its paces to resolve a geophysics challenge known as full wave inversion (FWI), according to subsurface technology chief scientist, Tom Ridsdill-Smith. “The idea is for us to test FWI on a small scale and also to test the hardware with the intention that if we can get all these things to work we will expand Moordiup to a Petaflop-scale machine which we think we’ll need for a production environment by about 2015.”

According to Ridsdill-Smith, FWI takes 3D seismic data that would otherwise be discarded when creating geological models and uses it to more accurately model where oil and gas reserves exist.

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