C a s e s t u d y
Revolutionizing
Reservoir
Simulation With
SilverStorm
Most top oil and gas companies have established comprehensive research
and development facilities encompassing the fields of petroleum geology,
drilling, production, gathering and transportation, machinery, and instrumenta-
tion. Over the past half-century, these companies have invested over a billion
dollars in scientific and technological capital for research and development
with a profitable five times (or more) return on their investment.
The Problem
For most companies, modeling geophysical phenomenon takes large, expensive systems
and days of computation to render a result.
In the oil and gas industry, by the time the result has been delivered and confirmed, re-
serves could go dry. this interruption of output flow is extremely costly to oil companies
as it has ramifications all the way to the end customers who use the petroleum products.
Quite often, when computations take too long or results are inaccurate, competitors dis-
cover, lease, and tap the oil field first, costing the company millions in lost revenues.
No successful company can afford either of these scenarios, but, as with all companies,
they also need to watch the costs of bringing in a new solution. the typical processing
environment, which often consists of several large, monolithic mainframe servers, is not
able to complete the simulations rapidly enough to meet their business requirements.
The Customer
One large oil and gas company, ranked as one of the highest producers of petroleum
products worldwide, chose silverstorm technologies as their networking partner to de-
ploy their next generation It infrastructure.
this top oil and gas company began looking for a high performance clustering solution
that would provide the speed, low latency, and scalability they needed, both now and
into the future. after extensive testing in their development lab, this company chose the
silverstorm solution.
The Test Environment
they tested their solution using the silverstorm 3000 InfiniBand switch combined with
Fabric access software to connect ten Itanium-2 based servers with PCI-X HCas all run-
ning RedHat Linux. the company was extremely pleased with both the results of the
performance tests and the expert technical support they received.
The Production Solution
“We were not able to meet our performance needs with any other interconnect solution
we tested so we turned to a high performance solution with silverstorm providing the
Results
•
simulations complete in half the time with three times the com-
putational throughput
•
3 year ROI of 150%
Executive Summary
Competition in all industries is fierce. this is especially true
for the oil and gas industry where the ability to accurately and
quickly track and forecast supply ratios, model geophysical
phenomenon, and develop safe, efficient instruments and
tools is vital to company viability.
top oil and gas companies, in partnership with silverstorm
technologies, acquire high performance clustering solutions
that will allow them to achieve their performance, efficiency,
and data integrity goals, thereby improving overall business
performance.
