ACADEMIA
Kuwait Oil Company deploys Sun cluster
Increased processing power leads to faster business decision-making and accelerates drilling process: Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) has deployed a Linux-based High Performance Cluster from Sun Microsystems to run its reservoir simulation software, increase its processing power, and enable the company to take critical business decisions faster than ever before. 
Kuwait Oil Company was established in 1934 as a joint venture between British Petroleum Company (BP) and Gulf Oil Corporation (GOC), then it was nationalized by Kuwait government in 1975. KOC nowadays is one of the largest oil companies in the world. As the backbone of Kuwait's economy, KOC is responsible for exploration, drilling, production, and development of the oil and gas fields in the State of Kuwait. The company is aiming to increase its export production capacity from 2.5 million bopd to 4.0 million bopd by 2020, to achieve this goal KOC needed a more efficient solutions to assist with exploration and drilling. Ms. Badria Abdul Rahman, Manager, Field Development, South & East Kuwait, Kuwait Oil Company said: "Before deploying the Sun Cluster in KOC, we used to use a system that could take several days and sometimes even weeks to run the simulation applications on which we base our business decisions. We needed a solution that would increase our processing power to 'crunch' the data generated by the reservoir simulation software more rapidly, giving us greater efficiency and the ability to take faster business decisions." Ms. Badria added: "The Sun cluster has exceeded our expectations and has enabled the entire KOC team to access vital up-to-date information on all aspects of the oil reserves; we are now able to run simulations faster than ever before which has resulted in the development of long term strategies and preparations for the future new wells to meet the production target. It took us almost two years to find the right solution, and after examining the most commonly-used technologies, we opted a solution that out-shone the rest - the Sun Cluster." MS. Mariam Al-Ajmi, Team Leader Information Systems added that the deployment of Sun cluster aligns with KOC IT Group strategy for deploying state-of-the art technologies with maximum ROI. The system is capable of running a number of simulation jobs simultaneously and has proven to deliver significant performance enhancement as simulation of massive reservoir models (in the order of 10 million cells) can be carried out at a reasonable time and at an affordable computing cost. An example of the ROI achieved is that one of the parallel test runs for a large simulation study model that was completed in just three days whereas it took up to five weeks to be finalized on the old machine prior to the introduction of the Parallel reservoir Simulation System clustering machines. Marc Heger, District Manager - Gulf Region, Sun Microsystems said: "While the system that KOC was previously using scaled up to most of the company's IT processing requirements, speed and limitation control over the proprietary system was an issue for them. By opting for a Sun clusters with standard, off-the-shelf processors and open standards like Linux, KOC were soon seeing the results of increased availability of data due to better computing power and faster application execution; the ability to scale to accommodate growth; increased utilization of computing resources; and a reduced risk and time to deployment." Sun's partner in Kuwait Diyar United Company played an active role in making this implementation a success. The Sun deployment at KOC was managed by Sun's Executive level partner Diyar United Company (DUC). "KOC selected Diyar for its systems integration skills and its experience as a turnkey solutions provider for the Oil Sector. Diyar successfully leveraged Sun's strong product portfolio to give KOC a Parallel reservoir simulation solutions to meet KOC's business needs which include easier implementation, meet future support requirements and ROI expectations," said Bashar Atout, General Manager, Diyar United Company. KOC are so impressed with the deployment that plans are already underway to ramp up the processing power by upgrading the cluster to 256 nodes in the next phase.
Kuwait Oil Company was established in 1934 as a joint venture between British Petroleum Company (BP) and Gulf Oil Corporation (GOC), then it was nationalized by Kuwait government in 1975. KOC nowadays is one of the largest oil companies in the world. As the backbone of Kuwait's economy, KOC is responsible for exploration, drilling, production, and development of the oil and gas fields in the State of Kuwait. The company is aiming to increase its export production capacity from 2.5 million bopd to 4.0 million bopd by 2020, to achieve this goal KOC needed a more efficient solutions to assist with exploration and drilling. Ms. Badria Abdul Rahman, Manager, Field Development, South & East Kuwait, Kuwait Oil Company said: "Before deploying the Sun Cluster in KOC, we used to use a system that could take several days and sometimes even weeks to run the simulation applications on which we base our business decisions. We needed a solution that would increase our processing power to 'crunch' the data generated by the reservoir simulation software more rapidly, giving us greater efficiency and the ability to take faster business decisions." Ms. Badria added: "The Sun cluster has exceeded our expectations and has enabled the entire KOC team to access vital up-to-date information on all aspects of the oil reserves; we are now able to run simulations faster than ever before which has resulted in the development of long term strategies and preparations for the future new wells to meet the production target. It took us almost two years to find the right solution, and after examining the most commonly-used technologies, we opted a solution that out-shone the rest - the Sun Cluster." MS. Mariam Al-Ajmi, Team Leader Information Systems added that the deployment of Sun cluster aligns with KOC IT Group strategy for deploying state-of-the art technologies with maximum ROI. The system is capable of running a number of simulation jobs simultaneously and has proven to deliver significant performance enhancement as simulation of massive reservoir models (in the order of 10 million cells) can be carried out at a reasonable time and at an affordable computing cost. An example of the ROI achieved is that one of the parallel test runs for a large simulation study model that was completed in just three days whereas it took up to five weeks to be finalized on the old machine prior to the introduction of the Parallel reservoir Simulation System clustering machines. Marc Heger, District Manager - Gulf Region, Sun Microsystems said: "While the system that KOC was previously using scaled up to most of the company's IT processing requirements, speed and limitation control over the proprietary system was an issue for them. By opting for a Sun clusters with standard, off-the-shelf processors and open standards like Linux, KOC were soon seeing the results of increased availability of data due to better computing power and faster application execution; the ability to scale to accommodate growth; increased utilization of computing resources; and a reduced risk and time to deployment." Sun's partner in Kuwait Diyar United Company played an active role in making this implementation a success. The Sun deployment at KOC was managed by Sun's Executive level partner Diyar United Company (DUC). "KOC selected Diyar for its systems integration skills and its experience as a turnkey solutions provider for the Oil Sector. Diyar successfully leveraged Sun's strong product portfolio to give KOC a Parallel reservoir simulation solutions to meet KOC's business needs which include easier implementation, meet future support requirements and ROI expectations," said Bashar Atout, General Manager, Diyar United Company. KOC are so impressed with the deployment that plans are already underway to ramp up the processing power by upgrading the cluster to 256 nodes in the next phase.