CLOUD

Silicon Graphics today announced it has sold a second 256-processor SGI Altix 3700 supercluster, a 40-processor SGI Altix 3700 system, a 64-processor SGI Altix 350 cluster, and a four-processor SGI Altix 350 system, to the Exploration and Production branch at Total, the major French oil and gas company. Delivered in December 2003 at Total's technical center in Pau, France, the 256-processor and 40-processor SGI Altix systems are designed to help Total's 44 exploration and production subsidiaries identify and develop onshore and offshore oil and gas prospects. Seismic analysis applications, which generate a digital image of the subsurface structure of the prospect or field under evaluation, and reservoir simulation applications will be run on these configurations. The systems, comprising respectively 256 Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processors at 1.3 GHz, with 2 terabytes of memory, and 40 Intel Itanium 2 processors at 1.3 GHz, with 120 GB of memory, will provide Total with additional processing power of 1.5 TFLOPS. These new machines will allow Total to reduce processing times, thereby optimizing decisions concerning drilling or the acquisition of assets within new areas. The system will complement the company's already existing SGI infrastructure and will be integrated into its storage area network environment, which is based on the SGI(R) InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS(TM). Total's Arnaud Althabegoity, head of scientific information systems, said, "We have chosen to continue to work with SGI, one of our closest business partners since 1998, because the new Altix 3700 supercluster is confirmed to be the most suitable to run our applications." To be installed at Total E&P USA Inc. in Houston, the SGI Altix 350 64-processor cluster is designed to help Total's geophysical research group to develop and industrialize new seismic processing algorithms. Total's Henri Calandra, head of geophysical research group, said, "We have chosen to work with the new Altix 350 system because we have access to a cost-effective cluster of SMP. We can now combine both explicit data parallelism and shared Memory parallelism which allow our applications to achieve the best performances and to be scalable." A four-processor SGI Altix 350 system will be used in addition to the 40-processor Altix to run reservoir simulation applications. SGI Technology Solutions provided the integrated services and support to deliver a complete end-to-end solution for Total. By integrating hardware, software, services, consulting, training and support, SGI Technology Solutions helps customers achieve their goals and optimize their investment in SGI(R) products.