INDUSTRY

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Statoil, a world leader in the production, development and distribution of petroleum products, has purchased and installed three SGI(R) Reality Center(TM) facilities to help in its continual search for new energy supplies. The new visualization systems, installed last spring and early summer in Statoil facilities in Harstad, Stjordal and Trondheim, Norway, augment two Reality Center installations that the company, based in Norway, has employed since 1998. Not only will the facilities be used to predetermine which areas are appropriate for drilling but, for the first time, they will also be active during the drilling itself, providing real-time three-dimensional imagery of the drilling site in progress. On-shore personnel based at a Reality Center installation several hundred miles away will be able to monitor the drilling constantly to ensure its accuracy. As well workers are not able to see where they're drilling, instant communication between the land-based team and on-site personnel will ensure that they stay within a 56-yard (50-meter) tolerance. Virtual representations created by one Reality Center operation can also be shared with other installations, allowing for collaborative visualization and analysis by other colleagues. For example, scientists and engineers utilizing Statoil's existing systems in Stavanger and Trondheim, Norway, have been able to examine and manipulate the same seismic data sets concurrently, ensuring that a common analytical methodology is being used. This increases the accuracy of the findings and reduces the time needed to decide whether the drilling site is viable. With increased exploration costs and tightening margins, techniques that can improve drilling success rates, reduce expenditures and cut the time to market have become extremely valuable in this very competitive field. "The increased drilling and exploration efficiencies enabled by using the new Reality Center facilities, coupled with time that we'll save, means that each installation will pay for itself with the first new well drilled," -more- said Trond Suul, Statoil director of high-performance computing and high-performance visualization. "Using our existing Reality Center technologies, we've already been able to reduce the cycle time on new exploratory sites from months to weeks, or even days." "We're gratified to see the trust that Statoil has shown in our Reality Center products," added SGI Director of Global Energy Solutions Bill Bartling. "Statoil's decision to purchase two new Reality Center systems is the direct result of the dramatic cost savings they have seen with the deployment of graphically rich SGI virtual environments," added Mark J.A. Miller, SGI's Oslo-based region manager. Statoil's new Reality Center installations will be powered by SGI(R) Onyx(R) 3400 graphical supercomputers, each incorporating 16 CPUs, 32GB of memory, two InfiniteReality3(TM) graphics subsystems and a two-channel flat display. Over 120 out of the 575-plus SGI Reality Center facilities around the world are installed at oil and gas companies. SGI Reality Center technologies deliver the highest levels of realism, image quality and performance available today. These state-of-the-art systems offer the ultimate in flexibility by supporting multiple independent users, high-performance users, group decision making in an immersive visualization facility environment and collaboration in a Visual Area Network environment. They are widely relied upon for real-time, highly interactive working sessions for: -- Design review and engineering -- Complex data analysis -- Critical and/or hazardous training -- Sales and marketing -- Scientific research, education and analysis -- Decision support -- Command-and-control operations