Leading Edge R&D:

SGI HOLDS ENERGY SUMMIT TO HIGHLIGHT VIZ TECHNOLOGIES

Leading energy industry executives and technology providers met at the SGI Energy Summit 2002 in Houston, Texas, to discuss collaborative visualization technologies driving a new era of oil and gas exploration. "Visualizing the Future: The New Energy Industry" focuses on the benefits of technology in reducing cost and increasing efficiency in oil and gas exploration.

"The SGI Energy Summit brings together energy industry leaders to analyze the key role of technology in the increasingly costly and complex business of energy exploration and production," said SGI Chairman and CEO Bob Bishop. "A new breed of graphic supercomputers is having a dramatic effect in reducing the complexity of decision making in this very strategic and global industry."

"The international oil and gas industry was among the first to adopt immersive visualization as a decision-making tool, turning seismic data into 3D images that teams of engineers and scientists walk through and manipulate in real time to decide with unparalleled precision where to drill their next well," explained SGI Director of Global Energy Solutions Bill Bartling. "This results in greater success for the oil companies, producing more oil from the same wells and extending the life of the oil fields, supporting improved shareholder value while at the same time reducing environmental impact and decreasing reliance on imported oil."

The keynote speaker is former U.S. Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, currently a candidate for governor of New Mexico. "As secretary of energy, I know firsthand the importance of science and technology in our energy future, having seen examples of how high-tech decision-making tools, like robotic oil rigs, have transformed the industry," Richardson said. "This remarkable commitment to continuous technological improvement has helped the industry reliably meet the energy needs of appreciative nations around the globe."

Additionally, executives from SGI, Landmark Graphics, Teraburst Networks, Obtree Technologies and such visualization research organizations as the BP Center for Visualization at the University of Colorado and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology were on hand to discuss and demonstrate the next generation and beyond of visualization technologies.

Highlights included:

• Bill Richardson joined a luncheon panel discussion on ways that new visualization technologies will change the industry business model
• John Sherman, executive vice president, marketing, Landmark Graphics, discussed the latest trends in visualization for seismic analysis
• Brad Reddersen, senior vice president, Visual Systems and Engineering Services, SGI, presented "Harnessing the Power of Visual Area Networking for Remote Collaboration"
• A demonstration of the OpenGL Vizserver computing solution, designed to deliver advanced visualization capabilities and performance to the desktop

With collaborative visualization technologies:

• An engineer on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico could drive a supercomputer in Houston to collaboratively illustrate a modified well path in real time to another engineer in a lab in another location
• A researcher in Alaska could collect seismic data and view a processed visual image of it quickly on his laptop without having to return to a lab first
• Scientists around the globe could collaborate on oil exploration projects to best determine how to most efficiently extract oil at a reduced impact to the environment
• Companies have increased drilling success rates from 15 percent to 70 percent
• Some major oil and gas companies have decreased their decision-making cycle from four or five months to just a few days

Among the topics covered were Visual Area Networking, which allows users to interact with visualization supercomputers using any client device running on existing high-speed data networks, individually or as a collaborative community. For more information about Visual Area Networking, please visit www.sgi.com/features/2002/jan/launch/index.html, and for details about the SGI Energy Summit, at the Houston University Hilton on the campus of the University of Houston, visit www.sgievent.com/upstream.