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Silicon Graphics today announced that British Gas Exploration and Production India Ltd., (BGEPIL) and Instituto Venezolano del Petroleo SA (INTEVEP) have invested in SGI Altix servers and supercomputers to maximize production from some of the world's largest deposits of oil and gas. The companies join other energy industry leaders including BP, Marathon Oil Company, Saudi Aramco, and Total in using scalable SGI Altix systems for their E&P business. Based on Linux and Intel Itanium 2 processors, Altix systems are crucial in helping many of these companies gain a sharper understanding of oilfields located miles below the earth's surface. "We needed a powerful and scalable platform for in-house seismic processing, including time/depth migration and some 3D wave migration," said Andrey Ortega, senior researcher at INTEVEP, a Venezuelan-based center that specializes in research, development, engineering and technical services in the oil and petrochemical industries, which recently purchased a 64-processor SGI Altix 3000 system with 144GB of memory. "We chose Altix because it simply outperformed other solutions on several levels, and provides us with a world-class open-source solution capable of holding our largest datasets in memory, so we can arrive at conclusions faster." With an open source-based system as a key criterion, INTEVEP selected Altix due to the SGI system's easier programming model and shared-memory architecture. INVTEVEP expects to install the Altix system next month. SGI today also announced that BGEPIL, a unit of BG India, which has been active in India's oil and gas sector for more than 10 years, purchased a 10-processor Altix 350 server with 20GB of memory and half a terabyte of local disk capacity. Installed at BGEPIL in June, the new Altix system will allow the British Gas unit to reduce simulation-processing time and optimize decisions related to drilling and acquisition of assets within new areas. "SGI has a long history of helping oil and gas companies attain increased value from their oilfields," said Bill Bartling, senior director of Market Strategy, Energy, SGI. "Altix is a powerful addition to this distinguished technology legacy, arming energy leaders with scalable, industry-standard servers and supercomputers whose benefits impact the bottom line." SGI Altix leverages the built-in SGI NUMAflex architecture, which dramatically reduces the time and resources required to run technical applications by managing extremely large data sets in a single, system-wide, shared-memory space. For the first time, more complex data sets and complete workflows can be driven entirely out of memory, enabling productivity breakthroughs that traditional clusters or enterprise-class UNIX servers can't tackle. Altix systems feature a fully supported, standard 64-bit Linux operating system and advanced SGI ProPack development environment specifically optimized for technical applications, such as ECLIPSE from Schlumberger/GeoQuest, along with a broad range of proprietary customer simulation code. (For a complete list of energy applications certified for Altix, visit www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/certified_apps.html.) At SEG 2004, SGI will demonstrate its acclaimed Altix systems -- along with SGI Remote Operations Center Collaborative Visualization Solutions -- in Booth 2006 of the Colorado Convention Center Oct. 10-13 in Denver.