Total HPC for Total

Total has selected the SGI® ICE™ X High Performance Computing (HPC) system as the platform for its new supercomputer named “Pangea.” Pangea provides the necessary data processing power for the identification of oil and gas reserves below the Earth’s surface. The massive amount of data the system generates is managed by the SGI InfiniteStorage ecosystem and the SGI DMF tiered storage virtualisation solution. Pangea is the largest commercial HPC system in the world1, giving Total’s in-house engineers and geologists an extremely powerful tool to enable the application of analytical and numerical models that support the development of three dimensional visualisations of underground geological formations, key to identifying potential deposits of oil and gas and to determining optimal extraction methods.

Total’s investment in Pangea will enable research scientists to develop more complete visualisations of seismic landscapes over time, while concurrently running simulations at 10 times the resolution of existing oil and gas reservoir models. Ultimately this new research should provide a clearer picture of what is happening beneath Earth’s surface, allowing for more efficient upstream oil and gas exploration, as well as the discovery of reserves under more challenging geological conditions.

“Total is committed to leveraging technological innovation and high performance computing to provide the best response to growing global energy demand,” said Philippe Malzac, CIO Exploration and Production for Total. “The efficiency of the SGI ICE X system, which represents high computational power using a minimal amount of energy, gives Total the smallest footprint and lowest TCO possible. This was a key factor in our selection of SGI ICE X for the Pangea system.”

To achieve an unprecedented level of energy efficiency in a solution of this scale and class, Total selected an innovative water-cooled SGI ICE X solution based on its M-Cell design. M-Cells utilise closed-loop airflow and warm-water cooling to create embedded hot-aisle containment, thereby lowering overall cooling requirements and significantly reducing overall energy consumption as compared to traditional HPC designs. Furthermore, by integrating this solution with a multi-tiered storage environment using SGI storage software and hardware, the SGI professional services team has ensured that the large data storage environment is optimised for efficiency as well.

“Total is recognised as being at the forefront of oil and gas exploration technology and we are proud to be a part of a continuing legacy that will help the company deliver sustainable production growth in the future,” said Jorge Titinger, president and CEO, SGI. “This is another proof point of SGI’s ability to deliver the differentiated compute and storage technologies that truly solve Big Data challenges.”

“HPC has become central to competitiveness in a wide range of industries, none more than in energy exploration,” said Dr. Rajeeb Hazra, Intel VP GM Technical Computing Group. “The Intel Xeon processors in the SGI ICE X HPC system drives the performance that is imperative to that competitiveness. We are excited to be a part of such an important system for energy exploration.”