Today Total announced they are boosting the compute power of their SGI Pangea supercomputer with an additional 4.4 petaflops provided by a new SGI ICE X system and based on the Intel Xeon processor. Purchased last year, the new SGI system is now in production and will allow Total to determine the optimal extraction methods more quickly. The SGI supercomputer allows Total to improve complex modeling of the subsurface and to simulate the behavior of reservoirs, reducing the time and costs associated with discovering and extracting energy reserves.
SGI solutions are designed to meet the complex and data-intensive challenges of the energy industry. Whether processing new data, archiving raw seismic data or running geographic simulations in rough or unchartered territories, SGI provides integrated, scalable high-performance computing, storage and visualization capabilities. SGI offers energy customers like Total deeper insights into the data so they can make more informed decisions that move energy reserves into production in less time.
For more than a decade, Total has used high-performance computing technologies from SGI to help efficient decision-making in the exploration of complex geological areas . Used by Total’s Seismic Imagery and Interpretation department, SGI will boost Pangea’s earlier SGI HPC system with an additional SGI ICE X supercomputer at its Jean Feger Scientific and Technical Research Center, located in Pau, France. The updated Pangea supercomputer has grown from its initial 2.3 petaflops in 2013 to provide an impressive 6.7 petaflops of computer power. Today, Pangea is one of the top 35 most powerful supercomputers in the world; according to the November 2015 TOP500 list.
Driving Increased Efficiency with Total’s Pangea Supercomputer
Pangea is a complete SGI solution, including professional services, installation services, customer support, data management, storage and compute. The updated system has the equivalent processing power of approximately 80,000 personal computers and storage capacity equivalent to approximately 27 million compact discs.
The previous Pangea supercomputer was a 2.3 petaflop system based on the Intel Xeon E5-2670 v1 processor which consisted of 110,592 cores and contains 442 terabytes of memory built on SGI ICE X. Now, one of the world’s fastest commercial distributed memory supercomputers, Pangea is supported by M-Cell technology and the Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600 v3 product family. The data management solution offers 18.4 petabytes of usable storage capacity including SGI InfiniteStorage 17000 disk arrays with Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre file system, and SGI DMF tiered storage virtualization.
The updated SGI ICE X configuration for Pangea features:
- An additional 9.2 petabytes of storage for a combined 6.7 petaflops
- An additional 4,608 nodes based on the Intel Xeon E5-2680 v3 processor that consist of 110,592 cores
- 589 terabytes of memory built across 8 M-Cells
- A closed-loop airflow and warm-water cooling create an embedded hot-aisle containment, lowering overall cooling requirements and significantly reducing overall energy consumption
- A power management system that allows the upgraded system to run on 4.5 megawatts of power
- Onsite professional service team dedicated to supporting TOTAL HPC operations, including application development and optimization
