The 10th most powerful computer on earth is helping geophysicists determine the smartest and safest way to extract oil and gas locked miles below the earth’s surface and oceans. The system is owned by Total, one of the largest energy companies in the world. As announced in the latest Top500 list of the world’s fastest computers, the new supercomputer: • Is ranked No. 10 on the new Top500 list • Can execute as many as 106 trillion operations every second • Has more memory than 10,000 desktop computers Key facts • Total’s new supercomputer is an SGI Altix ICE system powered by 10,240 Intel Xeon processor cores and 20,480 Gigabytes of memory, and integrated with a Petabyte (or 1,000 trillion bytes) of SGI InfiniteStorage systems. • Total joins numerous other SGI customers on the Top500, including SGI customers like the New Mexico Computing Applications Center (No. 7), NASA Ames Research Center (No. 25), and Leibniz Rechenzentrum (No. 27). • SGI provides the most productive and efficient supercomputers on the Top500 list. The Top500’s five most efficient supercomputers are all SGI systems, as are eight of the top 10, and 11 of the top 15. In fact, SGI is the only vendor to achieve efficiencies of more than 90 percent, with six systems achieving between 90 percent and 93.1 percent efficiency.