Software specialist for the oil and gas industry optimises exploration application using Intel Energy Competence Centre in Abu Dhabi, UAE
Dubai, UAE, March 22, 2004 – Intel announced today that Landmark Graphics Corporation, the leading provider of software and services for the oil and gas industry, has optimised its oil exploration application for the Intel® Itanium® 2 processor. The high-performance optimisation of VIP™, Landmark’s reservoir simulation suite used by approximately 30% of the world’s energy companies, will enable organisations to better predict future reserves.
Utilising powerful Intel Itanium 2 processor-based servers at the Energy Competence Centre in Abu Dhabi, which was established by Intel and IBM* to improve software specific to the oil and gas industry in the Middle East, Landmark’s VIP application was optimised to better simulate vast oil reservoirs. VIP will enable geoscientists to more accurately predict future reserves, as well as time and scale of oil production. The improved performance of Landmark’s VIP application was made possible through optimising the software to take full advantage of the Intel platform’s high memory capacity.
“When undertaking oil reservoir simulation, you’re virtually predicting the future and have to account for a huge range of variables,” said Dr. John Killough, Senior Research Fellow of Research and Development at Landmark. “As a result, the energy industry is increasingly turning to the high performance and vast memory capacity that Intel Itanium 2 processors deliver to handle the massive data volumes critical to such projects. VIP’s optimisation to Itanium 2 architecture means that jobs that previously took weeks to complete can now be turned around in a couple of hours, significantly increasing time-to-market and translating into real cost-savings for energy companies using the software.”
Landmark’s VIP software was optimised at Intel’s Energy Competence Centre using a cluster of Intel Itanium 2 processor-based servers, enabled with a Myrinet switch that scaled between 6 and 38 nodes, to ensure it had the capacity to run the most complicated tasks. This high-performance platform allows Landmark software to run vast reservoir replicas of virtually unlimited size and has significantly reduced the timescales for individual full-scale reservoir modelling tests.
“The Intel Energy Competency Centre in Abu Dhabi was set up to provide a hi-tech facility that all companies can use to optimise IT solutions for the energy sector,” said Ramzi Abdul Baki, Intel’s Business Development Manager for the energy sector in the Middle East, Turkey and Africa. “Our focus is to give full support to our customers and, by providing state-of-the-art platforms, such as the Intel Itanium 2 processor-based server clusters, ensure that the oil industry in the Middle East and beyond has access to world class solutions that will support its development for years to come.”
“Intel has a particularly strong track record of working with companies that deliver IT solutions to the energy industry,” said Tom Garrison, Director of Enterprise Marketing, Intel EMEA. “Our work with Landmark further builds on this tradition by utilizing the powerful industry-leading resources at Intel’s Energy Competency Centre. Ultimately, the high performance enabled by Landmark’s software optimization for Itanium 2-based processors will enable the energy sector to locate and extract oil faster and more effectively.”
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© Press Release 2004
