Companies in the Energy Sector Are Turning to Grid

451Group: Computing to Run Their Risk Management Applications Are Optimistic About the Use of Grids Among Oil and Gas Companies in Response to Business Pressure to Make Better Use of Resources. Companies that extract, make a market in and retail natural resources are increasingly disposed to running risk management applications using grid computing to balance their supply and demand ratios. Understanding risk and asset positions and being able to respond more quickly to price fluctuations, especially in today's volatile oil market, are executive-level requirements that demand

robust computing resources.

Oil and gas companies were early adopters of grids, but their deployments had progressed little beyond those applications for which they were originally procured.

We now find good reason to be more optimistic about conceded grid use among oil and gas companies. There appears to be more business pressure to make better use of resources, and the application of new techniques to everincreasing data sets provides a growing opportunity for all kinds of vendors.

Seismic data processing is one area that has dominated high-performance computing (HPC) and grid use across the energy sector. Seismic processing is an overwhelmingly parallel HPC application, and is therefore well suited to running on grids. When it can cost anything from $40m to $100m just to drill a hole in the ground, there are clear business benefits to improving the analysis of seismic data before drilling. The oil and gas industry has another application that can be readily processed on grids – reservoir modeling. This is the analysis of subterranean oil reserves, and it has become ever more important as oil prices rise and oil companies seek to

maximize the benefits of reserves. Grid computing enables users to extend conventional data modeling and 3D visualization techniques with other attributes, such as examining the effects of time (for 4D representation) or determining how the application of different operational conditions (more/less pipe pressure, etc.) will affect oil

delivery.

Many oil and gas companies own their own grids or clusters but also have experience in outsourcing to meet some additional capacity requirements. Some companies are awaiting the ability to seamlessly overflow grid queues to an outsourced service provider, which would bill them only for actual use. The issue for

vendors is that oil and gas companies can be difficult to support since they typically want to use thousands of CPUs, but only for a very short time. Other sectors mostly purchase longer contracts.

'Grid Computing – Adoption in the Energy Sector Publ 20060913