One of the world's largest oil exploration support service
companies is installing 2,500 Intel Xeon-based IBM servers running
on Linux in its London datacentre.
WesternGeco, the world's largest seismic services company, made the
investment to boost its oil reservoir imaging and data collection
services.
The company provides oil companies with 3-D images from seismic
data but needs enormous computing power to process the images.
In the past WesternGeco used a worldwide network of mainframes but
it has been trialling clusters of smaller IBM servers which, it
said, provided exceptional price/performance and
industrial-strength robustness.
"The complex algorithms we use to convert images into useable data
are incredibly processor-intensive, so both the high performance
and cost effectiveness of the Intel powered IBM servers are very
important to us," said Kannan Venkataraman, area manager for
Worldwide Computer Systems and Support, WesternGeco.
"We have been running tests for quite a while and it has convinced
us of the long-term value of using larger clusters and the Linux
operating system."
Venkataraman said the scalable clusters could easily handle changes
in processing requirements. "We can boost computing power by simply
adding more servers as capacity requirements grow.
"While we haven't abandoned our traditional non-Linux computer
systems yet, this is a significant step forward for us in a new
direction," he added.