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Amerada Hess, WesternGeco change seismic oil exploration systems.
Linux-based systems have gained a foothold in a traditional supercomputer stronghold: seismic oil exploration.
Oil and gas giant Amerada Hess's Houston-based Exploration department switched to Linux for three-dimensional (3-D) modeling used to find oil and gas in hard-to-reach underwater areas. Separately, WesternGeco, jointly owned by Schlumberger and Baker Hughes, also turned to Linux to produce 3-D images of the earth's subsurface.
Frustrated with the high costs and difficult upgrades of traditional supercomputing hardware used to process terabyte-sized exploration data volumes, Amerada Hess ported its IBM supercomputing software to Linux-based software servers. The company replaced its $2.5 million IBM system with a $420,000 Red Hat cluster.
Jeff Davis, Amerada Hess senior systems programmer, said the Linux system proved easier to upgrade and install. It is also several times more productive, he said.
"We started with IBM 3090 mainframes," Davis said, "Then, about 1993, we decided the IBM mainframes were too expensive and we would go with a distributed processing system. We used an IBM SP [scalable processor], one of the Deep Blue [supercomputer] machines that played chess. However, it was costing us about several hundred thousand a month for lease and maintenance."
About 1998, Hess decided to look at Linux, the senior systems programmer said. It started a pilot project with Paralogic, a supplier of turnkey, Linux-based parallel computing systems. Davis said Hess successfully ported its code to Paralogic in a matter of a few weeks.
"For about the cost of one month of the [IBM] SP system, we could buy a Paralogic system,"he said. Hess brought in a Paralogic system and successfully put it into production. However, Davis and others decided "we could do it cheaper if we did it ourselves," he said.
POWERED BY PCS
Hess initially bought 32 Dell Precision (dual-processor) Workstation 410s to power its 32-node Linux Beowolf cluster. The workstations proved compatible with Amerada Hess's initiatives, and the company ordered 32 additional units, plus a PowerEdge 1300 server to act as a file server for its Linux environment.
The exploration department installed Red Hat's kick-start software and found the Dell/Red Hat combination could do all that the Paralogic system did-at...