GOVERNMENT

Collaboration on new high-performance computing and visualization applications for the oil and gas industry unveiled: Paradigm, a leading provider of enterprise software solutions to the global oil and natural gas exploration and production industry announced their on-stage participation at the Intel Developer Forum Conference in San Francisco, California. Intel's annual developers' conference provides a forum for leading companies to demonstrate their most current technologies on Intel's latest product portfolio. Paradigm featured its latest high-performance computing and visualization applications for creating and interpreting subsurface images that make use of seismic data. These images assist oil company geoscientists in determining the locations of trapped hydrocarbons and in assessing their economic potential. High-performance computing and visualization enabled by Intel's technology are critical for creating and analyzing these images with accuracies and project time frames that minimize drilling costs and improve drilling safety. Paradigm and Intel used the forum to demonstrate the benefits of collaboration in the deployment of a new, high-performance computing application referred to as the Common Reflection Angle Migration. This collaboration will also be used to capture a benchmark (Paradigm Benchmark 1) in high-performance computing, which can be used by a broader community interested in testing relative CPU performance of current and next generation platforms. "The energy business is now a data business. The energy segment of the HPC computing market has lacked a relevant application benchmark up to now," said Intel's Patrick Gelsinger, Senior Vice President, and General Manager, Digital Enterprise Group. "Paradigm's Benchmark 1 fills this gap, and will help IT departments to more accurately size the computing resources they need to gain a competitive advantage." "We are tremendously pleased with the performance of our new imaging solution on Intel's current and next generation platforms. Oil companies and service providers will be able to immediately take advantage of the technology in their exploration and development programs," said Duane Dopkin, Senior Vice President of Technology at Paradigm. Paradigm software tools are used to guide E&P firms in all aspects of location, assessment and drilling, and their use has resulted in restatements and reassessments of reservoir status. Advances in subsurface imaging and visualization software solutions in the oil and gas industry have more impact when they are introduced with complementary advances in high-performance computing and visualization. The Common Reflection Angle Migration has the capacity to generate more informative and accurate images of the reservoir taking advantage of Intel's core microarchitecture, new bus architectures, math kernel libraries, and software tools. Images created from the Common Reflection Angle Migration were visualized on-stage with Paradigm's "3D Canvas" application and Intel's next- generation workstation platform. "The collaboration with Intel has resulted in technology improvements that have made a substantive difference in the way geoscientists can deploy, interact, and maximize the use of advanced software solutions for the oil industry," said Andrew Stein, Paradigm's Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. "Ultimately, the oil economy at large will benefit from our collaboration with Intel," he said.