PARIS, June 18, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE:
IBM) today announced it has built Pangea III, the world's most
powerful commercial supercomputer for Total, a supermajor
global energy company operating in more than 130 countries. The new
IBM POWER9-based supercomputer will help Total more accurately
locate new resources and better assess the potential associated
revenue opportunities. In addition, according to Total Pangea III
requires 1.5 Megawatts, compared to 4.5 MW for its predecessor
system. Combined with the increased performance of Pangea III,
Total has reported that they have observed that the new system uses
less than 10% the energy consumption per petaflop as its
predecessor.
Pangea III is being built using the same IBM POWER9
AI-optimized, high-performance architecture as used in the U.S.
Department of Energy's Summit and Sierra supercomputers. Because
IBM POWER9 is optimized to take advantage of attached accelerators,
it is designed to help Total not only improve performance but also
improve energy efficiency in their HPC workloads.
"Pangea III's additional computing power enhances Total's
operational excellence. It enables Total to reduce geological
risks in exploration and development, accelerate project maturation
and delivery, and increases the value of our assets through
optimized field operations, with all this at lower cost," stated
Arnaud Breuillac, President of Total Exploration & Production.
Exploring new oil and gas prospects, Total must first create an
accurate picture of what lies underground, through the use of
seismic data acquisition during exploration campaigns.
Geoscientists then use these images to identify where oil and gas
resources lie. This process creates massive amounts of data that
IBM POWER9 systems can easily handle with industry-exclusive
technology.
In a competitive bidding process, Total selected IBM due to an
industry-leading approach to GPU-accelerated computing. IBM worked
with NVIDIA to jointly develop the industry's only CPU-to-GPU
NVIDIA NVLink connection, which allows for 5.6x faster memory
bandwidth between the IBM POWER9 CPU and NVIDIA Tesla V100
Tensor Core GPUs than the compared
x86-based systemsi. This will help Total to process the
vast amount of data required in seismic modeling to get more
accurate insights faster than they previously could.
Some of the fields where Total states that they plan to apply
Pangea III's compute power include:
- Higher Resolution Seismic Imaging in exploration and
development phase - new algorithms will process large data sets
to produce higher resolution images to help Total more reliably
locate hydrocarbons below ground. This is especially useful in
complex geological environments where layers of salt in the Earth
can make getting accurate readings challenging, such as in Brazil, the Gulf of Mexico, Angola and the Eastern Mediterranean.
- Reliable Development and Production Models –
through increased computing power, Total will use innovative
reservoir simulation methods that, for example, integrate the
field's production history to generate more reliable predictive
production models faster
- Asset Valuation and Selectivity – through early
assessment of the value of exploration acreage and asset
opportunities, Total will enhance selectivity in their new
ventures.
"Based on the same IBM technology found in Summit and Sierra,
the world's smartest supercomputers, Pangea III demonstrates that
IBM Power Systems are not just for the large government or research
organizations," said David Turek,
Vice President of Exascale Systems for IBM Systems. "The world's
largest businesses, like Total, are now tapping that same
technology to profoundly change how they operate. It also gives
them room to explore the role IBM Power Systems can play against
their most data-intensive workloads like hybrid could and AI."
According to Total, Pangea III, which has a computing power of
25 petaflops (equivalent to 130,000 laptops), with a storage
capacity of 50 petabytes, becomes the No. 11 amongst all public and
private supercomputers globally. Pangea III is also the #11 overall
on the latest iteration of the Top500 ranking of
supercomputers.
For more information on how IBM POWER Systems are turbo-charging
business computing, please visit:
https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/solutions/hpc
Contacts:
Sam Ponedal
External Relations, IBM Cognitive Systems
sponeda@us.ibm.com
916-217-0145
i 5.6x I/O bandwidth claim based on NVIDIA
measurement test conducted on a Xeon E5-2640 V4 +P100 vs Power9 +
V100 (12 GB/s vs 68 GB/s rated)
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SOURCE IBM