Big Oil’s Favorite Toy: Supercomputers (2018)
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Re: Big Oil’s Favorite Toy: Supercomputers (2018)
#2Nun new. Supercomputing has been used in Oil & Gas exploration for decades.
Re: Big Oil’s Favorite Toy: Supercomputers (2018)
#3Aren't they Big Oil's old favorite toy? In the 90s, a local university near me had a Cray XMP that was a gift from some oil company after they'd decommissioned it.
Re: Big Oil’s Favorite Toy: Supercomputers (2018)
#4After research labs big oil has always been the 2nd largest client for supercomputers for decades. It's even mentioned in 90s films Hackers[0] as "The Gibson."
Re: Big Oil’s Favorite Toy: Supercomputers (2018)
#5Nun new. Supercomputing has been used in Oil & Gas exploration for decades.
Indeed, but interestingly enough the book, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, only has 9 mentions of the word computer and zero for supercomputer.
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power
https://www.amazon.com/Prize-Epic-Quest-Money-Power/dp/14391...
Re: Big Oil’s Favorite Toy: Supercomputers (2018)
#6I was working as a hired SGI/SUN admin via ABB for Statoil in 1997 in Stavanger. The HQ was packed with Ultra 60s with creator3d or elite3d cards. Some even had both. We had to keep a few hundred of these running and they were used to explore seismic data visually.
Those machines were pretty powerful for those days, almost at supercomputer level. One cost more than a years salary for me back then.
But Oil has always loved computers.
Re: Big Oil’s Favorite Toy: Supercomputers (2018)
#7Aren't they Big Oil's old favorite toy? In the 90s, a local university near me had a Cray XMP that was a gift from some oil company after they'd decommissioned it.
I'm in software dev, my dad was in geophysics, he's always had a much better work computer than me.
Re: Big Oil’s Favorite Toy: Supercomputers (2018)
#8New big data jobs in oil exploration?
Yup: https://www.oilandgasjobsearch.com/Oil-and-Gas-Jobs/Search/B...
Re: Big Oil’s Favorite Toy: Supercomputers (2018)
#9Shell Oil had a Cray 1 and an ncube when I worked there in 1989. Chevron had a Cray 1 and a raft of IBM mainframes in 1990. Chevron's DC was set up for visitors so every cluster had a sign describing the computing power for that system. Total compute power was very important because it meant they could do more analysis on seismic data to refine their oil and gas lease bids.
Chevron had so much seismic data they required (from memory) six robot tape libraries. They were ganged together so the picker robots could hand tapes between cabinets in case all drives in a given cabinet were in use. It was cool as hell to watch the camera mounted right above the picker flying around this dark wall of tapes to go grab one.
One of Shell's Quality training videos was about The Guy Who Lost The Tape; seems a seismic data tape was mislabeled and lost, causing Shell issues with bidding on a lease. Their Deming-style quality training was all about preventing that sort of thing happening again. I dare say their data was more valuable in total than the hardware.
Re: Big Oil’s Favorite Toy: Supercomputers (2018)
#10Aren't they Big Oil's old favorite toy? In the 90s, a local university near me had a Cray XMP that was a gift from some oil company after they'd decommissioned it.
My grandmother was an analyst for Gulf/Shell going back into the 60s. She was a resident FORTRAN/COBOL expert that was recalled in the 90s after retirement.
Data and systems analysis at scale is definitely not new to them.