BP to spend millions on drilling supercomputer

[xchrom]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/dec/07/bp-super-computer-drilling


BP's current main computer in Houston has a processing capacity of one petaflop, but the new model will double that. Photograph: BP


BP is to spend $100m (£62m) over the next five years in an attempt to find more oil using what it claims is the world's largest supercomputer for commercial research, with a memory equivalent to nearly 150,000 iPods.

A new "high-performance computing centre", which will boast 536 terabytes of memory, will open next summer at the firm's US headquarters in Houston. The centre will eventually see 5,000 computers and 67,000 central processing units hooked up together.

BP said the new equipment will be able to perform 2,000 trillion calculations a second and will cut the time taken to perform the imaging of subsea rock formations from four years to 24 hours.

[gtar100]

1. It's good to see they weren't held up on progress because of that little incident in the Gulf.

Would hate to see them get distracted.