ENGINEERING

Intel announced that ADMA, the leading Abu Dhabi-based energy producer, has standardised its core oil exploration operations on a supercomputing cluster featuring high performance Intel Itanium 2 processors to reduce costs and drive business growth. The Intel-based system immediately delivered a three-fold processing performance improvement at 50% of the cost of the legacy RISC-based system in simulating and modeling reservoirs, increasing the speed, accuracy and precision with which ADMA is able to locate, explore and extract oil deposits to support its expanding operations. The oil and gas company drills over 35 oil wells and produces over 750,000 drums of oil each year, making it critical that its centralised seismic processing system provides accurate 3D models of the earth's sub-surface to help engineers identify prime oil and gas prospect opportunities for drilling. The resulting models can be sliced and reprocessed to highlight how fluid will flow through the earth's surface and the precise location at which oil can be best extracted, streamlining overall operations. ADMA's supercomputing cluster will be extended to over 120 Intel Itanium 2 processors in early 2005, providing the number-crunching performance required to enhance the accuracy and clarity of the 3D models upon which ADMA develops its production strategies. By delivering ADMA with dramatically reduced total cost of ownership than with the legacy system, the Itanium 2-based platform allows the energy producer to reduce operating costs and maximise profits from its oil exploration operations. ADMA also selected Intel Itanium 2-based servers to power its Schlumberger* ECLIPSE reservoir simulation application to migrate from a proprietary infrastructure to open-standards based architecture, mitigating risk in its future IT deployment strategy. ADMA established the performance improvements and cost reduction over the legacy RISC-based system during extensive evaluation in the Intel Energy Competency Center in Abu-Dhabi, a high-tech facility designed to allow customers to optimise solutions for the energy sector. Following evaluation, ADMA was able to deploy the Intel Itanium 2 processor-based platform in only two weeks. 'In order to effectively process complex simulation data it is essential that our business operations are underpinned by powerful computing technology. We selected Intel Itanium 2 processors to power our operations, from GeoModeling to reservoir simulation,' said Ahmed Al-Riyami, Reservoir Application System and Support Team Leader, ADMA. 'The Itanium 2 processor based system both provides the data-intensive processing performance required to dramatically improve the speed and accuracy with which we can extract oil deposits, and also reduces operational costs. In addition, the migration from RISC-based systems to open-standards based Intel platform breaks us free from the shackles of proprietary architectures, providing enhanced price/ performance for us to extend our IT infrastructure cost-effectively as our business needs grow.' 'Organisations throughout the energy industry are increasingly investing in open-standards based Intel-based platforms to power all business operations, from the locating, exploration and extraction of oil and gas, to the transportation, distribution and management of goods across the supply-chain,' said Ramzi Abdul Baki, Business Development Manager, Energy Sector, Intel Middle East, Turkey and Africa. 'Intel Itanium 2 processors deliver the sheer number-crunching processing performance required by oil companies to simulate oil reservoirs, while also offering optimum reliability and scalability to support business growth.'