Saudi Aramco, the world's leading oil producer, has ported its mission-critical seismic data processing application to a cluster of 1,800 Intel processors. The new solution, which has boosted throughput by many folds and is expected to grow to a cluster of 4,000, has enabled Saudi Aramco to identify and tap new reserves faster, more efficiently and at a lower price.

For the Saudi Arabian national oil company, which has discovered and oversees one-quarter of the world's conventional oil reserves, accelerating the detection of oil and gas supplies is critical. It continually explores new reserves by collecting vast amounts of seismic data from sound waves it sends through the ground to reveal the geological layout deep below the earth's surface. This information, which is enhanced through a set of compute-intensive algorithms known as Prestack Time Migration (PSTM), is used to create 2D and 3D images of oil and gas targets.

'This is a mission-critical application,' said Mohammad Huwaidi, exploration systems analyst (Application team leader for deploying the PSTM on the PC-cluster) at Saudi Aramco. 'It does some of the most important work in our business.'

With its data volumes doubling each year, Saudi Aramco had to ensure its PSTM application could grow quickly, efficiently and cost effectively to meet its escalating seismic data processing needs and to maintain its world leadership position. Unconvinced of price/performance of other existing platforms it was using, Saudi Aramco worked with IBM to explore using Intel processors instead. The result was a highly scaleable and affordable cluster of 128 Intel Pentium III processors which quickly grew to 1,800 processors as the company validated performance and reliability. And the cluster is still expanding.

By the end of 2002, there were close to 4,000 Intel CPUs performing Prestack Time Migration. 'We've built the fastest yet least expensive PSTM system,' said Huwaidi. 'The stability is good and getting better with time, and our ability to rapidly and inexpensively add computing power to our cluster is a major benefit of the Intel platform.'

Intel Solution Services assisted with the optimisation of the PSTM code, which is installed on the 1800-processor cluster located at Saudi Aramco's exploration building in Dhahran. During two days of intensive programming, Intel Solution Services helped in optimising the PSTM code by using the Intel Fortran for Linux 6.0 compiler and the Intel Vtune Performance Analyser to identify parts of the code for further optimisation.

'We were able to get the PSTM application to run at least 33 percent faster on the same Intel Chip,' explained Gernot Hoyler of Intel Solution Services in Munich. 'And with additional tuning, we hope to boost performance by 50 percent.'

John Woodget, Director of Computing and Solutions Marketing, Intel EMEA, commented: 'Saudi Aramco has built a high performance computing cluster from Intel processors that is fast, stable, flexible and affordable. The solution's superior scaleability and price-performance ensures that Saudi Aramco can grow its PSTM cluster to meet its future requirements. By deploying Intel-based systems, Saudi Aramco is benefiting from open, standards-based technologies that make it easier to adapt and rebuild its infrastructure as its needs change.'

Saudi Aramco's PSTM application runs on a cluster of 900 IBM rack-mounted 1U node, each with two 1.4 GHz Intel Pentium III GHz processors with 2GB of memory. The operating system is RedHat Linux 7.2 and the cluster interconnect is 100Mb Fast Ethernet.