Over at KAUST News, Nicholas G. Demille writes that the Shaheen supercomputer has completed the world’s first trillion cell reservoir simulation. A Saudi Aramco research team led by fellow Ali Dogru conducted the reservoir simulation using Shaheen and the company’s proprietary software TeraPOWERS. The Aramco researchers were supported by a team of specialists from the KAUST Supercomputing Core Lab, with the work rendering imagery so detailed that it changed the face of natural resource exploration.
The ‘trillion cell’ designation refers to how dense and high-resolution the imagery is,” explained KAUST Computational Scientist Lead Saber Feki. “Think of it this way: we all carry megapixel cameras in our pockets. The Saudi Aramco team just simulated subsurface images with six orders of magnitude higher resolution on our machine. It’s research that will yield much more reliable information for oil exploration and production.”
The Shaheen II supercomputer is a Cray XC40 system delivering over 7.2 Pflop/s of theoretical peak performance. With 5.536 Pflop/s of sustained LINPACK performance, Shaheen II is currently #15 on the TOP500. The system has 6,174 dual sockets compute nodes based on 16 cores Intel Haswell processors running at 2.3GHz. Each node has 128GB of DDR4 memory running at 2300MHz. Overall the system has a total of 197,568 processor cores and 790TB of aggregate memory. Fig. 1 summarizes the specifications of the Shaheen II system.
In March of 2017, KAUST will host HPC Saudi, a premier regional event where participants can meet, share ideas and develop collaborations. This will be the seventh edition of the HPC Saudi conference, and this year it will focus on coordinated efforts for the advancement of the HPC ecosystem in the Kingdom.
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