Rice Oil and Gas HPC Workshop highlights industry challenges

Oil and Gas HPC Workshop at Rice University highlights industry challenges

BY TED WALKER
Special to the Rice News

Leaders from the oil and gas industry and the high-performance computing (HPC) and information technology industry, as well as academics and representatives from national laboratories, met at Rice University March 1 for the fifth annual Rice Oil and Gas HPC Workshop.

The oil and gas industry depends heavily on high-performance computing to spur meaningful returns on its significant investments in drilling and production. The huge demands on data and processing in oil and gas are driven by the services that support geophysical mapping, like seismic imaging and reservoir simulation, to help companies assess reservoirs and place wells.

The workshop’s 300 attendees — a record number for the event, which is organized by Rice’s Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology — heard talks from industry and academic leaders and participated in workshops that delved into tools and techniques leading the way forward in HPC in the oil and gas industry. Because this was more than a conference with formal talks, networking and conversation were at the forefront, and vendors and workshop participants from around the world engaged in dialogue about opportunities and challenges.

“The growth of the workshop continues to show the importance of high-performance computing as a critical business enabler and differentiator in the oil and gas industry, with a well-understood return on investment,” said Jan Odegard, executive director of the Ken Kennedy Institute. “The energy at this year’s conference was a strong indicator of the desire to attack head-on the challenges in applying computing across the oil and gas industry.”

Interactive talks covered a wide range of topics, from algorithm optimization, performance and programing tools, such as HPCToolkit and Loo.py, to programming models and languages, including Coarray Fortran and OpenCL. The wide range of discussion also covered the challenges for developing and managing HPC facilities and infrastructure, and the open-source software framework IWAVE.

The workshop also featured several keynote addresses on emerging HPC and data center challenges in the oil and gas industry.

The 2012 Rice Oil and Gas HPC Workshop was organized by a team that included Odegard, Henri Calandra of Total, Keith Gray of BP, David Judson of WesternGeco, Bill Menger of Weinman Geoscience, Scott Morton of Hess Corp. and Chap Wong of Chevron.

Presentations and archived webcasts will be available at http://og-hpc.org. For more coverage of the conference, visit http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2012-03-14/oil_and_gas_hpc_workshop_highlights_industry_challenges.html?page=1.