EMGS Adds More IBRIX Fusion to Speed Oil & Gas Exploration Services

Company’s New Data Center Capable of Performing 70 Trillion Calculations Per Second: IBRIX today announced that Electromagnetic Geoservices ASA (EMGS), the market leaders in deep electromagnetic imaging, has purchased additional IBRIX Fusion file serving software to support its newest compute cluster, named Aurora, located in Trondheim, Norway. EMGS provides valuable information that helps exploration professionals locate commercial hydrocarbon reservoirs and rank prospects for drilling, reducing the risks and costs of drilling dry holes. The IBRIX solution is integrated with 1,300 new Dell PowerEdge 1955 dual-core servers in addition to their 530 original dual processor Dell PowerEdge 1855 servers and 106 terabytes of EMC CX3-40 storage in 4 EMC CX3-40 arrays. The solution enables EMGS to scale its business and gain a competitive advantage by reducing the time needed to deliver sophisticated information products to energy companies. EMGS first deployed IBRIX in 2005 in its original data center. At that time, EMGS was processing ocean floor data from two ships and supporting scientists in one location. Since then, EMGS has opened four additional offices and grew its fleet to five vessels—soon to be six. The Aurora cluster supports geologists and geophysicists in all five locations performing three times more surveys than before. In addition, as surveys become more sophisticated with the use of 3D inversion and grid modeling, the computational complexity increases tremendously. “The continued growth of EMGS places a severe demand on our computing resources, increasing the number of jobs we process from 300 to 15,000+,” said Helge Stranden, IT manager at EMGS. “When we embarked on building a new cluster, the decision whether to continue using IBRIX Fusion as our file serving solution of choice was clear. Since 2005 IBRIX has demonstrated terrific performance in our high volume cluster and, most importantly, we have stable connections from all the nodes, enabling our always-on environment.” EMGS began focusing on electromagnetic (EM) imaging in 2002 with the commercialization of seabed logging. Using EM energy to locate offshore hydrocarbons is the first step in determining if a reservoir has potential and if so, whether further investments in extensive seismic surveys are warranted. The technology has enabled EMGS customers to dramatically improve their exploration efficiency in frontier and mature basins. The company’s founders, Terje Eidesmo, Svein Ellingsrud, and Ståle Johansen, were recognized on March 10 by the Norwegian Petroleum Society for their contribution to petroleum geophysics. “We are proud to have EMGS as a repeat customer, and to be deployed in one of Europe’s most powerful supercomputing centers,” said Milan Shetti, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, IBRIX. “IBRIX Fusion breaks through the performance barrier for data-intensive applications that require stable high bandwidth and high I/O throughput to dramatically increase performance. In addition to providing additional headroom to process more sophisticated surveys, our product supports EMGS’ continued growth by providing more computing power for CPU-intensive R&D activities.” Visit IBRIX at Storage Networking World, April 7-10, 2008, Booth #106 at the Rosen Shingle Creek Resort, Orlando.