BP is about to launch the world's largest commercial supercomputer at its new research centre.
Scheduled to open in mid-2013, the new High-Performance Computing (HPC) centre will serve as a global hub for processing and managing the vast amounts of geological and seismic data generated by BP's operaions around the world. The computer will allow scientists to produce clear images of rock structures that are deep underground, ultimately, reducing drilling risk and shortening timetables of future exploration programs.
The new HPC will be housed in a three-storey, 110,000-square foot facility with more than 67,000 Computer Processing Units (CPUs). It is expected to be capable of double the processing speed of BP's existing centre, which is now working at maximum power and cooling capacity, having become the world's first commercial research centre to achieve a petaFLOP of processing speed - or one thousand trillion calculations per second. The new computer will almost double this speed.
Currently, the world's fastest supercomputer is the non-commercial Cray Titan – which is used for scientific projects at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and was built with funding from the US Department of Energy. The Titan has a processing speed of 17.59 petaFLOPS.
According to BPO, the new number cruncher will include a total memory of 536 terabytes, with disk space of 23.5 petabytes – the equivalent of 147,000 Apple iPods with 160GB memory. If stacked vertically, those iPods would climb nearly five times higher than New York's Empire State Building.