American Oil and Gas Reporter - January 2015 - 155

TECH TRENDS
as a NVIDIA Telsa adapter with a CPU
roughly the size of a small stack of business cards," Collins posits. "This could
be the biggest development in high performance computing this year."

Hitachi Data Systems has a team of scientists working on analyzing drilling and production data from thousands of wells, utilizing a visualization environment, which Bjorn Andersson, director of social innovation and global industries solutions marketing, calls
the next big leap in integrating big data analytics and visualization.

around the globe now without data security
issues," he declares, saying geophysicists
anywhere can collaborate on their models
in real time and at acceptable speeds.
Good network links and HPC-aware
applications help. "More and more technology is smart enough to figure out user
intent," Collins observes. "For example,
knowing that a user is turning a model,
the application could fully refresh only
when the rotation ends."
Remote visualization in certain applications may not be quite the same experience as being local to the data, but he
says it is very good and getting better.
Collins says geophysicists can fly
through their data using tools such as
Oculus VR®, which provides users a 3-D
experience through a head-mounted tracking device. "This is a great alternative to
a visualization wall, particularly if it can
be a shared experience with one person
tracking and others watching," he asserts.
He adds that Google also has a lowend version of this device called Cardboard.
"To attract and retain young workers,
companies must compete with game developers and other industries," Collins
contends. "3-D visualization through
headset tracking is a way for the oil industry to leverage the technology's 'cool'
factor."
He says software developers can speed
seismic interpretation and visualization
by tapping into graphics accelerators.

NVIDIA Corporation's CUDA product
family has been the dominant solution,
but Collins says he believes Intel may
change that. To this point, accelerators
have been separate graphic processing
units. "In the second half of 2015, Intel
is going to build its Xion Phi accelerator
into the CPU. Users then will have a
compelling argument to look at NVIDIA
alternatives," Collins opines. "There will
be less heat, less cost, and less power required."
He points out that every NVIDIA card
draws 325 watts and each server can
have eight cards. Add this to the 135
watts taken by each CPU, and data centers
begin to run out of power and cooling,
he says. "Now, replace something as big

HPC in the Cloud
Oil and gas companies have been conservative in their approach to the cloud,
suggests Leo Reiter, chief technology
officer at Nimbix Inc. "This is easy to
understand because their data and algorithms are very sensitive and their datasets
are huge," he reasons.
Yet, the largest recent security breaches-National Security Agency, Home Depot
and Target-have not been in the public
cloud, he says. "The reality is that the
public cloud can be very secure," he assures.
Performance is a second concern. Reiter says advances are being made in
moving data quickly in the cloud environment, and HPC is starting to show up
there. However, the majority of cloud infrastructure is built for Web services. He
says oil industry professionals trying the
cloud for high performance applications
often choose a hybrid experience, where
the data remain on internal systems, but
there is burst capacity available from the
public cloud.
For high performance applications,
Reiter advocates a purpose-built infrastructure. With supercomputers in the
cloud, there is some evidence that performance can exceed that of in-house
clusters, he says.
But high performance applications
present challenges when data are remote.

Simplified Example of a Remote Visualization Framework

Senior Geophysicists in
Traditional Office Locations

Remote Engineers in
Locations with Decent Internet

Secure Private
Corporate Network

As few as four and up to several hundred servers, each
with two to eight accelerators and specialized visualization
software reside in a standard corporate data center. These
accelerators process the work more quickly and
consolidate expensive engineering software licenses.
Virtualization from Vmware and Citrix allows several
remote users to share resources seamlessly from the
cluster.

Secure Connection
via Public Internet

Corporate
Firewall

Onboard Ships,
Remote Locations,
Unreliable Connections

Remote Location
via Satellite

Adopters of this approach see better performance, use of
resources, and lower overall IT costs compared with
placing advanced workstations at every potential user's
desk.
This also allows engineers in different locations to
collaborate more easily.

JANUARY 2015 155

American Oil and Gas Reporter - January 2015

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