Oil and Gas Company Total France Upgrading SGI HPC Pangea

Silicon Graphics International Corp. (SGI) announced that energy company Total has chosen SGI to upgrade its supercomputer ‘Pangea.’

Total is one of the largest integrated oil and gas companies in the world, with activities in more than 130 countries. Its 100,000 employees put their expertise to work in every part of the industry – the exploration and production of oil and natural gas, refining, chemicals, marketing and new energies. Total is working to help satisfy the global demand for energy, both today and tomorrow.

SGI will boost Pangea’s current SGI ICE X HPC system with an additional 4.4 petaflops of compute power thanks to a new ICE X system, supported with M-Cell technology, storage and the Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600 v3 product family. This updated system would place in the top 10 of the latest TOP500 list, which was published in November 2014.

SGI solutions are designed from the ground up to meet the complex and data-intensive challenges faced by numerous customers in the energy industry. Whether processing, archiving raw seismic data or running geographic simulations in rough or unchartered territories, SGI provides integrated, scalable performance computing, storage and visualization capabilities. SGI’s innovations provide customers with time and cost savings, facilitate performance and enable energy companies to stay competitive.

“Oil and gas companies have faced increasing difficulty in the discovery and extraction of new oil and gas reserves in recent years, making HPC technology a crucial tool for organizations in this industry,” said Jorge Titinger, president and CEO, SGI.

“Total has long been recognized as a leader in oil and gas exploration through the use of HPC technology,” Titinger continued. “When we began our relationship with Total more than 15 years ago, our goal was to continually provide the capacity and power required for the company to pursue its oil and gas research throughout the world. We are proud to be part of what has become a continuing legacy of technological research at Total and with this system upgrade, SGI’s innovative solutions will continue to help the company deliver sustainable production growth in the future.“

Total’s Pangea Supercomputer
The current Pangea supercomputer is a 2.3 petaflop system based on the Intel Xeon E5-2670 v3 processor that consists of 110,592 cores and contains 442TB of memory built on SGI ICE X, one of the world’s fastest commercial distributed memory supercomputers. Integrated by SGI professional services, the data management solution for 18.4PB of usable storage capacity includes SGI InfiniteStorage 17000 disk arrays with Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre* File system, and SGI DMF tiered storage virtualization.

The updated SGI ICE X configuration for Pangea will also feature an additional 9.2PB of storage. It will also have an additional 4,608 nodes based on the Intel Xeon E5-2680 v3 processor that consist of 110,592 cores and contains 589TB of memory built across 8 M-Cells. Closed-loop airflow and warm-water cooling create an embedded hot-aisle containment, thereby lowering overall cooling requirements and reducing overall energy consumption as compared to traditional HPC designs. Pangea is a complete SGI solution, including services, storage and compute.

To give context to the scale of Pangea’s updated compute power, it has the equivalent processing power of approximately 80,000 personal computers and storage capacity equivalent to approximately 27 million compact discs.

Pangea is located at Total’s Jean Feger Scientific and Technical Centre in Pau, France. Once the new upgrades are installed, Pangea will run on 4.5 megawatts of power.