Empowering geoscientists with more deskside high-performance computing power could increase oil and gas production overall, claims a new survey released March 6 by Microsoft Corp.
The Microsoft High-Performance Computing Oil and Gas Industry Survey 2007, sponsored by Microsoft and conducted by Houston-based Gelb Consulting Group Inc., shows a trend toward geoscientists in the oil and gas industry taking more personal control of their technical computing environments.
"Clearly, this research shows that oil and gas experts know the impact their work has on their companies' success," said Craig Hodges, director of the U.S. Energy Industry Unit at Microsoft. "They appreciate having computing power at their fingertips and also require smoother integration with the applications they use in analyzing and reporting the information on which they make critical decisions."
The online survey was conducted in February and includes responses from more than 100 qualified oil and gas industry experts worldwide, Microsoft said. Significant findings include:
* Eighty-one percent report that more ready access to high-performance computing capability could increase oil and gas production.
* Eighty-six percent have computing power at their deskside, and 69 percent prefer computing power at their desktops.
* Sixty-one percent believe that having the capability to run additional tasks and iterations will reduce project risk.
* Fifty-six percent prefer to schedule their own jobs to a technical computing or HPC cluster rather than refer to a cluster administrator to manage the job queue.
* Forty-seven percent say their computing-intensive scientific applications require multiple iterations.
* Twenty-five percent of computing-intensive scientific applications still take from overnight to more than a week to run.
Recent hardware and software advances, such as more powerful, lower-cost processors and the launch of Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, have made it easier for geoscientists to complete deskside high-performance computing, Microsoft said, adding that as a result, geoscientists now have the ability to make better decisions regarding prospect generation, lowering the probability of dry holes and speeding up the time to first oil.
"Since the mid-1990s, the upstream oil and gas industry has had the goal of achieving dramatic cost savings in the area of technical computing," said John Elmer, president of Gelb Consulting Group. "This goal is being achieved today."
It used to be the case that geosciences applications managers would not let go of their UNIX machines for mission-critical applications, Microsoft said, noting that the tide has now turned with smart-client PCs and applications reaching a level of maturity, reliability and stability that has caused "even the skeptics" to trust a move to Microsoft Windows.
"This new approach to high-performance computing doesn't replace supercomputers in oil and gas. Instead, it makes technical computing more available to more people at a lower cost," said John Fikany, vice president of the U.S. Manufacturing Group at Microsoft, which includes the Oil and Gas Industry Unit.
He added: "By using Windows Compute Cluster Server, geoscientists are empowered to easily access, analyze and garner deeper insights from complex data and information. This ultimately leads to getting oil and gas from the subsurface to the pump safer, faster and more efficiently."
Microsoft said the survey respondents work for oil and gas companies, oilfield service or supply companies, academia, engineering, consulting, or construction firms, or are drilling contractors. Each respondent is a user, application manager, developer, technical support staffer, evaluator, recommender or authorizer of purchase decisions for hardware and software related to technical computing.
Full survey results are available at http://microsoft.com/oilandgas.
