ACADEMIA

Working to maximize the return from some of the largest oil and gas reserves in the world, Abu Dhabi-based Zakum Development Company (ZADCO) is now able to analyze and visualize oil and gas reservoirs faster and more accurately than ever before. Servers and visualization solutions from Silicon Graphics have enabled ZADCO engineers to cut reservoir simulation times nearly in half. Using SGI systems (on display at SEG in Booth #1030) and software and consulting services from Landmark, a brand of the Halliburton Digital and Consulting Solutions Division, simulations that previously required two weeks to compute now can be completed in just 50 hours. At a time when the entire world is concerned with energy prices and availability, the hours saved offer ZADCO shorter time to insights, enable the development of more efficient well paths, and help to maximize oil and gas resources under development. Such benefits are vital to ZADCO, which develops some of the world's largest oil fields located in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). According to Oil and Gas Journal, the UAE contains crude oil reserves of 97.8 billion barrels, or slightly less than 8 percent of the world total. Abu Dhabi holds 94 percent of this amount, or about 92.2 billion barrels. One giant offshore field alone, Upper Zakum, contains an estimated reserve of some 16 billion barrels. ZADCO expects to achieve yields of up to 1.2 million barrels/day from Upper Zakum. ZADCO's productivity gains have been achieved using four recently acquired SGI Altix 350 systems -- powered by a total of 56 Intel(R) Itanium 2 processors -- and an immersive SGI Reality Center driven by a 16- processor SGI Onyx 3900 visualization system with InfiniteReality4 graphics. Global shared-memory delivers key advantage ZADCO engineers leverage the Altix systems exclusively for reservoir simulation, for which they use Schlumberger Eclipse software. The Altix systems, which were purchased in May and installed in June, were selected because of their proven ability to dramatically cut simulation time, in addition to the Altix architecture's support for standards-based 64-bit Linux environment and industry-standard Intel Itanium 2 processor technology. Companies like ZADCO often simulate extremely large reservoirs, and this leads to the generation of massive data sets. Because CPUs in commodity clusters cannot share memory, engineers running simulations on clusters have to cut the data set into pieces and then simulate it one piece at time. But with Altix, ZADCO can hold the entire reservoir in memory and interact with the whole data set at once. The result is analyzing more data in real time. Also built on SGI's shared-memory architecture is ZADCO's SGI Reality Center, the result of a joint effort between SGI and Landmark that provides a collaborative, immersive environment to visualize reservoirs located miles beneath the bottom of the ocean. Purchased in April with installation complete in September, the Reality Center visualization environment gives engineers a chance to work together to determine extraction strategies and map well paths for reservoirs that ZADCO develops, including the massive Upper Zakum discovery. "To see a reservoir in its entirety -- and in a high-resolution, immersive environment -- makes an enormous difference in an engineer's ability to understand how to maximize an exploration opportunity," said Gilbert Soufan, general manager, SGI Middle East and North Africa. "The SGI Reality Center running Landmark GeoProbe software put these extremely large reservoirs literally at ZADCO's fingertips." SGI's shared-memory architecture benefits not only the company, but individual engineers as well. "Engineers are better served by focusing on optimizing oil production, and not on computer science," said Soufan. "With SGI systems, they don't spend all day trying to partition their code and data sets, so engineering teams have more time to do their jobs. This is really what a computing resource should enable."