CPTC plays a key role in Chevron's worldwide search for oil and gas by providing technology research, development and deployment to its exploration and production business units. The company purchased the POWER Onyx system unveiled today by Silicon Graphics to significantly upgrade its three-dimensional subsurface imaging capabilities. CPTC also will use the new system to bring high-performance computing technology to Chevron's business units in a timely, cost-effective manner.
"CPTC's investment in the POWER Onyx system demonstrates Chevron's commitment to supercomputing technology," said Don Paul, president of Chevron Petroleum Technology Company. "Silicon Graphics' new system will enable us to reduce the time and cost required to bring this technology to Chevron's business units. With its ability to combine high-speed numerical performance and powerful graphics, the POWER Onyx computer is the ideal system for Chevron's 3D subsurface imaging efforts."In its work in the fields of geophysical processing and reservoir engineering, Chevron relies heavily on sophisticated visualization tools to interpret data and manipulate complex 3D geologic models. Silicon Graphics' visual computing technology enables the company's professionals to not only construct models of subsurface layers but to determine their geologic properties. With the POWER Onyx system, Chevron professionals can construct models of geologic structures miles below the surface of the earth -- models that are more complex and detailed than was possible on previous computing platforms.
"By basing critical work on the POWER Onyx system, Chevron has positioned itself as a leader in the application, management and deployment of graphics supercomputing technology," said Mike Ramsay, vice president of Silicon Graphics' Visual Systems Group. "Chevron is translating the world's most advanced visual computing technology into products and services to find more oil and gas, and to operate more efficiently."Chevron recently installed a 20-processor Onyx graphics supercomputer with 3GFLOPS of peak performance. Initial tests show that Chevron has been able to achieve more than 80 percent of the theoretical peak performance - an extremely high rate of utilization.
The POWER Onyx graphics supercomputer is based on the 64-bit MIPS(r) RISC R8000TM microprocessor, which provides floating point computational performance roughly equivalent to a Cray Y-MPTM supercomputer. Offering a record-setting SPECfp92 benchmark of 310, the R8000 microprocessor is the first superscalar implementation of the MIPS architecture. The R8000 CPU is designed for symmetric multiprocessing so that multiple processors can be coupled with the same computer - providing customers with superior performance on applications traditionally solved by large, expensive supercomputers.
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