Vendor Spotlight:

MORE ENERGY EXPLORATION FIRMS TURN TO SGI ALTIX

Silicon Graphics announced that British Gas Exploration and Production India Ltd., (BGEPIL) and Instituto Venezolano del Petroleo SA (INTEVEP) have invested in SGI Altix servers and supercomputers to maximize production from some of the world's largest deposits of oil and gas. The companies join other energy industry leaders including BP, Marathon Oil Company, Saudi Aramco, and Total in using scalable SGI Altix systems for their E&P business. Based on industry-standard 64-bit Linux and Intel Itanium 2 processors, Altix systems are crucial in helping many of these companies gain a sharper understanding of oilfields located miles below the earth's surface.

"We needed a powerful and scalable platform for in-house seismic processing, including time/depth migration and some 3D wave migration," said Andrey Ortega, senior researcher at INTEVEP, a Venezuelan-based center that specializes in research, development, engineering and technical services in the oil and petrochemical industries, which recently purchased a 64-processor SGI Altix 3000 system with 144GB of memory. "We chose Altix because it simply outperformed other solutions on several levels, and provides us with a world- class open-source solution capable of holding our largest datasets in memory, so we can arrive at conclusions faster."

With an open source-based system as a key criterion, INTEVEP selected Altix due to the SGI system's easier programming model and shared-memory architecture. INVTEVEP expects to install the Altix system next month.

SGI also announced that BGEPIL, a unit of BG India, which has been active in India's oil and gas sector for more than 10 years, purchased a 10- processor Altix 350 server with 20GB of memory and half a terabyte of local disk capacity. Installed at BGEPIL in June, the new Altix system will allow the British Gas unit to reduce simulation-processing time and optimize decisions related to drilling and acquisition of assets within new areas. (See related announcement.)

"SGI has a long history of helping oil and gas companies attain increased value from their oilfields," said Bill Bartling, senior director of Market Strategy, Energy, SGI. "Altix is a powerful addition to this distinguished technology legacy, arming energy leaders with scalable, industry-standard servers and supercomputers whose benefits impact the bottom line."

SGI Altix leverages the built-in SGI NUMAflex architecture, which dramatically reduces the time and resources required to run technical applications by managing extremely large data sets in a single, system-wide, shared-memory space. For the first time, more complex data sets and complete workflows can be driven entirely out of memory, enabling productivity breakthroughs that traditional clusters or enterprise-class UNIX servers can't tackle. Altix systems feature a fully supported, standard 64-bit Linux operating system and advanced SGI ProPack development environment specifically optimized for technical applications, such as ECLIPSE from Schlumberger/GeoQuest, along with a broad range of proprietary customer simulation code. (For a complete list of energy applications certified for Altix, visit http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/certified_apps.html.)

Availability

SGI Altix 350 systems are available today in configurations up to 16 processors per node, and extended to hundreds of processors using industry standard interconnects. SGI Altix 3000 systems are available today in configurations of 4 to 512 processors. For customers demanding even larger Altix systems, SGI plans to support configurations of 1,024 and more processors over time. Additional Altix system technical and availability information is posted on http://www.sgi.com/servers/altix.

Total Chooses SGI For Storage Solutions

In addition, the Exploration and Production Branch at French energy giant Total recently expanded its already extensive capabilities provided by servers and storage solutions from Silicon Graphics (NYSE:SGI) . The move is expected to allow Total to maximize its return on drilling investments made throughout the world by strategically approaching each discovery for optimal output.

With the June deployment of six additional SGI Altix servers, 48 more terabytes of SGI InfiniteStorage at Total's technical center in Pau, France, researchers can simultaneously conduct detailed seismic analysis on more drilling opportunities. The new resources allow the Pau facility to better help Total's 44 exploration and production subsidiaries confidently identify and develop onshore and offshore oil and gas prospects. Total uses reservoir simulation applications and seismic analysis applications to generate a digital image of the subsurface structure of the prospect or field under evaluation.

With the latest acquisition, Total geophysicists and reservoir engineers can leverage one of the world's largest commercial installations of SGI Altix systems. Each of Total's six new SGI Altix 3000 systems is powered by 64 Intel Itanium processors, each with 8GB of system memory. The new servers tap 48 terabytes of SGI InfiniteStorage TP9500 storage via a storage area network (SAN), with the SGI InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS and SGI InfiniteStorage Data Migration Facility (DMF) providing access to another 100 terabytes of previously installed storage. The CXFS SAN provides instant data sharing for increased productivity among the company's existing installation of Altix servers.

"As a consequence of a policy of continuous implementation of additional Itanium processors, Total is today working on one of the most powerful computers in the world," said Jacques Delvaux, Seimic Processing Dpt Deputy Manager at Total. "By deliberately choosing to implement industry-standard technologies, Total has chosen a platform optimized for performance and agility. And extending our investment in SGI storage and visualization solutions gives us optimal flexibility in accessing, visualizing, and managing up to 2 petabytes of seismic data on current and future drilling prospects. With this latest acquisition, we are enhancing our own technology and economic leadership, both of which are critical in the very highly competitive petroleum research market."

"Total is using leading-edge technology to extend its competitive edge well into the future," said Tom Garrison, Intel Director of Enterprise Solutions and Marketing for EMEA. "By deploying SGI servers based on the Intel Itanium processor, Total acquires the ability to run complex simulations requiring large amounts of memory at a great price/performance."

Energy Industry Needs are Escalating

With data sets commonly surpassing 10 terabytes in size, the energy industry increasingly depends on advanced analysis and visualization of data assets, along with the ability to leverage the expertise of individuals scattered across the globe, to make informed investment and management decisions about oil and gas discovery and production. SGI offers the energy industry a combination of technologies that no other vendor can match.

• Compute. SGI Altix leverages the built-in SGI NUMAflex architecture, which dramatically reduces the time and resources required to run technical applications by managing extremely large data sets in a single, system-wide, shared-memory space. For the first time, more complex data sets and complete workflows can be driven entirely out of memory, enabling productivity breakthroughs that traditional clusters or enterprise-class UNIX servers can't achieve.
• Storage. The pairing of CXFS with DMF provides localized data centers with the bandwidth and storage capacity they need to accelerate workflow by efficiently processing and storing huge data sets. CXFS allows data to be shared between globally dispersed data centers at high bandwidth, without resorting to copying, thereby avoiding countless hours in lost productivity. With DMF, energy companies can dramatically and cost-effectively scale storage capacity without sacrificing the ability to access archived data rapidly.
• Visualization. In seismic processing and reservoir modeling, SGI visualization solutions can save energy companies millions of dollars through improvements in accuracy of well placement and significantly increase balance sheet assets by increasing known recoverable reserves. By combining support for memory sizes greater than 128GB, unparalleled computational power and world-leading graphics processors, SGI delivers an unbeatable resource capable of meeting the demands posed by increasingly complex field exploration and the expectation of increasingly efficient exploitation.

At SEG 2004, SGI will demonstrate its acclaimed compute, storage and visualization solutions in Booth 2006 of the Colorado Convention Center Oct. 10-13 in Denver.

Availability

SGI Altix 350 systems are available today in configurations up to 16 processors per node, and extended to hundreds of processors using industry standard interconnects. SGI Altix 3000 systems are available today in configurations of 4 to 512 processors. For customers demanding even larger Altix systems, SGI plans to support configurations of 1,024 and more processors over time. Additional Altix system technical and availability information is posted on http://www.sgi.com/servers/altix.

SILICON GRAPHICS | The Source of Innovation and Discovery

SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc., is a leader in high-performance computing, visualization and storage. SGI's vision is to provide technology that enables the most significant scientific and creative breakthroughs of the 21st century. Whether it's sharing images to aid in brain surgery, finding oil more efficiently, studying global climate, providing technologies for homeland security and defense or enabling the transition from analog to digital broadcasting, SGI is dedicated to addressing the next class of challenges for scientific, engineering and creative users. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and can be found on the Web at http://www.sgi.com.