DEVELOPER TOOLS

Grid technology manages HPC workload to help scientists be more efficient in finding petroleum resources. Altair Engineering announced that it has formed a partnership with Permedia Research Group the developer of MPath to integrate Altair's PBS Professional grid technology into MPath's Distributed Risk Module (DRM). The partnership will ensure PBS Professional's ongoing support of DRM and provide a road map with which Permedia can take advantage of advanced workload management technology. MPath is the industry-leading petroleum migration and reservoir filling simulator, capable of handling very high-resolution models of complex petroleum systems. Using MPath's built-in risking capability, upstream companies can generate and rank hundreds of realizations to constrain cases where large uncertainties exist in the input parameters, which is typical for any exploration scenario. Integrated with PBS Professional, DRM can generate more realizations in less time by running multiple simulations concurrently on a distributed computing grid. PBS Professional is an open workload management solution for high- performance computing (HPC) environments. The software maximizes the utilization of computing resources by intelligently scheduling and managing computational workload in a number of industries. By increasing the efficiency of the hardware and software resources, PBS Professional reduces total cost of ownership and provides true business value to grid computing customers. "Petroleum companies rely on HPC resources to make mission-critical exploration decisions," said Permedia Managing Director Dan Carruthers, Ph.D. "Their processes require massive compute resources and long runtimes. Powerful, easily accessed compute resources are essential to exploration decisions that have significant monetary consequences. By integrating PBS Professional with MPath, our customers can run more simulations with their existing hardware and make better decisions. We are delighted to have partnered with Altair to make this happen." "PBS Professional was designed specifically for HPC environments like oil and gas exploration, where large amounts of data must be processed across a broad spectrum of input parameters to ensure a successful project outcome," said Michael Humphrey, vice president of Altair's PBS GridWorks business unit. "Altair is pleased to partner with Permedia, because that partnership will allow our customers to make better-informed decisions through simulation technology."