As part of the ongoing collaboration between the Gazprom Neft Science and Technology Centre and the Peter the Great St Petersburg Polytechnic University (Polytech) in geological prospecting, company specialists have investigated the possibility of processing data using high-performance computing systems — specifically the Polytech supercomputer,* the third largest in Russia. Computations generated on seismic prospecting, flow simulation, geo-mechanics and fracturing modelling will reduce calculation times by two- to four-fold, as well as allowing greater volumes of data to be processed.
Software for processing seismic data and constructing hydrodynamic models was installed and tested on the Polytech supercomputer in early 2017, whereupon, assisted by specialists at the Supercomputer Centre, the process of launching programme modules and setting testing objectives was optimised and debugged. Test simulations are the most cutting-edge resource-intensive procedures used in processing onshore seismic data. The software installed at the Supercomputer Centre is compatible with that already in place at the Gazprom Neft Science and Technology Centre, and is used to undertake the most high-performance and resource-intensive tasks in building velocity-depth models, performing deep migration transformations, and multivariate modelling, using large amounts of data. Work on the supercomputer will be carried out remotely from computers at the Gazprom Neft Science and Technology Centre.
Mars Khasanov, Director General of Gazprom Neft’s Science and Technology Centre commented: “The efficiency of oil companies today depends directly on the application of new technologies. The amount of information that any large industrial company has to work with today is colossal. Given the specifics of our industry, we often have to deal with highly diverse and poorly structured data, especially when it comes to complex reserves. Our task is to use the available capacities of the most cutting-edge computer systems for processing information; using a supercomputer is just one of the solutions to such problems”.
The Peter the Great St Petersburg Polytechnic University (Polytech) completed the creation of its Supercomputer Centre (SCC) — home to Russia’s third highest-capacity computer, with a total peak operational capacity of more than 1.2 Petaflops (quadrillion floating point operations per second) — in late 2015. Two of its most powerful computing systems, in fact, are separate supercomputers — the first being the “Polytechnic RSC Tornado” (distributed control system) cluster, and the second the massive parallel system, the “Polytechnic RSC PetaStream”. The SCC’s total computing resources comprise 25,000 cores, with total peak power consumption of 1 MW. Systems are equipped with direct fluid cooling.
The complex also includes a parallel storage system (data storage system), built around a Lustre distributed file system and capable of hosting 1 Petabyte (PB) of data, as well as a cloud data storage facility of 0.5 PB. Both repositories use server technologies based on Intel architecture. The total headcount at the Supercomputer Centre is 20 people.
