INDUSTRY

QATAR Petroleum (QP) is set to introduce Grid Computing technology, the newest standard in the global oil and gas industry, in the first quarter of next year, to reduce costs on proprietary technology while improving productivity and efficiency. “Grid Computing will take the use of Information Technology to new heights at QP, which used to run simulation programs for oil and gas reservoir engineering on powerful computers, right from the early 80s,” IT assistant manager (business systems development), Ali Abdulla al-Emadi explained. The official was speaking to Gulf Times in the background of the Supercomputing Day conference, organized by Texas A&M University at Qatar on Thursday in Education City and co-sponsored by QP. After developing strong roots in the global academic and research communities over the last decade, Grid Computing, based on clustering technology, has successfully entered the commercial world. It is about accelerating product development, reducing infrastructure and operational costs, leveraging existing technology investments and increasing corporate productivity. Grid Computing currently offers the lowest cost high-throughput solution, enabling companies to migrate from expensive high-performance computers. In the oil and gas industry, Grid Computing can save companies substantial amounts by allowing them to not only collect and analyze high-resolution data to pinpoint drilling sites, but also to do it with great speed and accuracy. “It was in 1988 that QP began to access a supercomputer, installed abroad, through a leased line, before purchasing its first supercomputer in the early 90s and supplementing it with two more supercomputers thereafter,” recalled al-Emadi. Apart from the supercomputers, QP has also been running many clusters of computers, considering that supercomputing clusters are a cost-effective way of getting to the results provided by supercomputers. “We have clustering at two levels, such as operation systems for filing and related activities and the application side that involves e-mail systems,” he said. The supercomputers are primarily used by QP for oil and gas reservoir simulation tasks, number crunching applications and intensive algorithms which require power and speed. “They are running on Eclipse software, which is used by all the leading oil and gas companies globally,” he observed. Grid Computing applications areas in oil & gas also include reservoir simulation and modelling, seismic processing (2D, 3D, & 4D), horizontal drilling, material science calculation and analysis, risk analysis, and business intelligence and reporting optimization.