Total purchased an SGI Altix ICE system enabling computing power of 123 Teraflops, a petabyte of storage (500TB of SGI InfiniteStorage storage systems and an additional 500TB for shared storage with other cluster resources), providing timely access to data needed for its oil exploration and production planning. At Total's technical centre in Pau, France, researchers can simultaneously conduct detailed seismic analysis on more drilling opportunities. The new resources allow the Pau facility to better help Total's more than 40 subsidiaries confidently identify and develop onshore and offshore oil and gas prospects. Total uses seismic analysis applications developed in its research and development department to generate a digital image of the subsurface structure of the prospect or field under evaluation.

"Drilling cost increases justify significant investment in seismic processing capabilities to better model subsurface structure. As a result, Total has invested in one of the most powerful computers in the world and will continue adding compute capacity over the next years", stated Philippe Chalon, Senior Vice President, Finance and Information Systems at Total Exploration and Production. "And by extending our investment in SGI storage solutions gives us optimal flexibility in accessing and managing up to 2 petabytes of seismic data on current and future exploration prospects. With this latest acquisition of compute and storage capability, we are enhancing our own technology and economic leadership, both of which are critical in the very highly competitive oil and gas business."

Total's new SGI Altix ICE system, ordered in December, is powered by 10,240 Intel Xeon cores, each with 2GB of system memory and is expected to be fully installed in Summer 2008. The new server taps 500TB of SGI InfiniteStorage 10000 storage system via a Lustre distributed file system. Another part of this project is the implementation of a separate Lustre cluster, providing access to 1 petabyte of storage for instant data sharing for increased productivity among the company's existing installation of HPC servers.

"Energy industry computational needs are escalating", stated Bo Ewald, chief executive officer, SGI. "With data sets commonly surpassing 10TB in size, the oil and gas industry needs performance solutions for its computational and data driven problems, along with the ability to leverage the expertise of individuals scattered across the globe, to make informed investment and management decisions about oil and gas discovery and production. SGI offers the energy industry a combination of compute, storage and visualization technologies that no other vendor can match."