The installation of a cluster of supercomputers has drastically reduced the time taken to carry out reservoir simulation calculations and raised productivity, a company operating in the UAE’s oil industry has reported.

Abu Dhabi-based Zakum Development Company (Zadco) said it was able to cut the time taken for those calculations from two weeks to just 50 hours following the installation by Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI) and Emirates Computers of a cluster of 64-bit SGI Altix 350 Linux-based supercomputers incorporating breakthrough Itanium II processor technology at the oil company’s offices.
  The move resulted in a massive productivity gain for its reservoir-modelling teams, Zadco said.
“Before opting for SGI’s system, we invited several vendors to prove the capabilities of their solutions in a price/performance competition. This competition would ensure that Zadco got the best productivity gains for our budget”, said Dr. Mohammed Adnan Al Taweel, a member of the company’s benchmark and technical evaluation team.
“By using industry-standard technology such as Intel’s Itanium processors and the flexible Linux operating system we got a solution that gave us power that we could only dream about a year or so ago at a price that brought supercomputing into a new affordability class,” he added.
When Zadco first started looking for a solution to speed up reservoir modelling in June 2004, it challenged supercomputer vendors to deliver a 64-bit Linux-based solution that would cut simulation time from two weeks to around 50 hours. The vendor that could meet those specifications at the best price won the contract.
Emirates Computers together with SGI put together several designs that met Zadco’s specifications. These were based on the SGI Altix supercluster family. 
“The winning configuration, using the SGI Altix 350, gave Zadco a high performance, reliable, and flexible architecture at an affordable price.  Zadco’s case is a shining example of Emirates Computers’ philosophy to offer our clients the most suitable technology at the best possible price with the best customer experience,” said Hani Harik, president and CEO of Emirates Computers.
Added Tony Abou Jawad, Emirates Computers’ technical computing manager: “The SGI Altix 350’s design is inherently reliable with features like processor redundancy, proactive diagnostics with advanced warning all based on the sturdy SGI XFS file system. To complement this reliability, Emirates Computers Engineering Services facilitates the link between reservoir software, LSF queuing system, and SGI hardware. Our SGI engineering support service is carried out by highly certified engineers who are experienced in relevant oil and gas applications.”
Today’s Altix systems are flexibly based on industry standard technologies including off-the-shelf Intel 64-bit Itanium II processors, standard Redhat or Suse Linux operating system and standard disks and memory.
Unlike simple clusters where nodes are either one or two processors, the higher-powered SGI Altix 350 scales to 16 processors per system. This number of processors in a single box with one operating system and a single-system image (memory) traditionally was not possible with commodity hardware until the invention of the SGI Altix family in 2003.