Delivering Performance & Scalability to Oil & Gas Exploration & Simulation Technology Infrastructure

Oil & Gas exploration companies need to take advantage of technologies which help to streamline their business processes, ensure the most efficient and accurate exploration possible, and enable the most efficient extraction from existing reservoirs. This requires a high performance computing platform that enables deeper and faster simulations and provides higher precision visualization capabilities. Recent successes have shown that Voltaire and its Grid Backbone® product family enable Oil and Gas companies to improve their production efficiency and expedite their exploration processes.

To support deeper and faster analysis and obtain the best performance possible from key upstream applications, large compute and storage infrastructure is required. Clusters and grids are by far the most economical approach for delivering large scale systems -- however, they create new challenges in scalability. Selecting an interconnect fabric that can deliver high bandwidth and low latency is critical to overcoming these challenges.

The Voltaire Solution

Voltaire has developed three core solutions for Oil and Gas exploration companies, that when combined together provide a powerful platform to address the challenges described above. These core solutions are:

• High Speed, Low Latency Inter-Processor Communication
  
• Scalable File System Solutions
  
• Visualization Solutions
  

High Speed Interprocessor Communication

Voltaire's InfiniBand-based Inter-processor communication (IPC) solutions deliver high scalability to compute clusters through a very efficient, low overhead clustering capability that enables better utilization of the server nodes by the application.

Scalable File System Solutions

Voltaire has significant experience and expertise in enabling large scale parallel file system deployments. Such solutions include: Lustre, HP SFS, IBM GPFS, Panasas and PVFS. These solutions, when combined with InfiniBand, solve two critical problems that NFS creates: limited throughput and limited scalability. Voltaire's multi-service switches which provide integrated InfiniBand, Ethernet and Fibre Channel connectivity in a single chassis provide an elegant solution for this.

Visualization Solutions

Visualization clusters typically require very high bandwidth and Voltaire's InfiniBand DDR solutions with up to 20Gbps per host link are ideal for this. In addition, the low overhead on the CPU frees it to carry out the image processing faster. The result is a powerful solution that delivers higher levels of resolutions and faster image processing.