Petroleum engineering sector in UAE gets massive productivity boost from SGI Altix 350 series architecture

This follows the installation by SGI and Emirates Computers of a cluster of 64-bit SGI Altix 350 Linux-based supercomputers incorporating breakthrough Itanium II processor technology at the oil company's Abu Dhabi offices.

"Before opting for SGI's system, we invited several vendors to prove the capabilities of their solutions in a price/performance competition. This competition ensures that ZADCO gets the best productivity gains for our budget", said Dr. Mohammed Adnan Al Taweel, a member of ZADCO's benchmark and technical evaluation team.

"What we got was a solution that, while using industry-standard technology such as Intel's Itanium processors and the flexible Linux operating system, gives us power that we could only dream about a year or so ago at a price that brings supercomputing into new affordability class," he added.

When ZADCO first started looking for a solution to speed up Reservoir Modelling in June 2004, it challenged supercomputer vendors to deliver a 64-bit Linux-based solution that would cut simulation time from two weeks to around 50 hours. The vendor that could meet those specifications at the best price won the contract.

Emirates Computers together with SGI put together several designs that met ZADCO's specifications. These were based on the SGI Altix Super Cluster Family.

"The winning configuration, using the SGI Altix 350, gave ZADCO a high performance, reliable, and flexible architecture at an affordable price. ZADCO's case is a shining example of Emirates Computers' philosphy; to offer our clients the most suitable technology at the best possible price with the best customer experience", said Hani Harik, President and CEO of Emirates Computers.

"The SGI Altix 350's design is inherently reliable, with features like processor redundancy, proactive diagonistics with advanced warning all based on the sturdy SGI XFS filesystem. To compliment this reliability, Emirates Computers Engineering Services faclitiate the link between Reservoir Software, LSF Queuing System, and SGI hardware. Our SGI engineering support service is carried out by highly certified engineers who are experienced in relevent Oil & Gas applications," added Tony Abou Jawad, Emirates Computers, Technical Computing Manager.

Today's Altix systems are flexibly based on industry standard technologies including off the shelf Intel 64-bit Itanium II processors, standard Redhat or Suse Linux operating system and standard disks and memory.

Unlike simple clusters where nodes are either one or two processors, the higher powered SGI Altix 350 scales to 16 processors per system. This number processors in a single box with one operating system and a single system image (memory), traditionally was not possible with commodity hardware until the invention of the SGI Altix family in 2003.

"The trick to the performance is in the NUMAFlex architecture that ties all the subsystems together and gives the system the breakthrough bandwidth exactly for these types of technical applications," said Gilbert Soufan, General Manager SGI MENA.

"The same NUMA Flex architecture allowed NASA to build an SGI Altix Super Cluster comprising 10,240 CPUs. This is the fastest supercomputer ever installed at a customer site and will assist NASA in its understanding of the process of global warming, nuclear reactions and other similar projects that require massive calculations. This is the sort of power the ZADCO solution is based on," he concluded.