Energy

SGI^® Reality Center^TM Yields Big Returns in the Energy Industry

Oil companies have adopted SGI Reality Center technology to improve their success rates in discovering economically viable petroleum reserves. Extensive use of 3D seismic data and directional drilling techniques has played a key part in improving the well-completion rate. Further improvements in drilling success and production efficiency have come from the addition of new types of information derived from 3D and 4D seismic data. However, these technologies have presented challenges to exploration teams because of the volumes of data involved and the cross-disciplinary integration of these data sets. Only in the collective work environment of SGI Reality Center can the diverse disciplines necessary for successful oil exploration come to a fast and accurate consensus on the location of the next discovery.

The Stavanger Reality Center facility

Asset teams now recognize the Reality Center facility as a key component of the successful integration of seismic and reservoir data into a valid earth model. More than 40 oil companies and seismic contractors worldwide currently use this technology in more than 120 Reality Center facilities. Some advantages of the SGI Reality Center environment include the speed and volume of data handling and the visual understanding gained from the vastly increased spatial and pixel resolutions available with SGI^® Onyx^® family systems. This boost to the interpretation and collaborative decision process, coupled with the increased size and sophistication of display devices, makes SGI Reality Center the environment of choice for successful oil companies. In many areas, such as the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea, the Reality Center has become the standard decision system. In the very near future, researchers in distant locations using SGI^® and third-party software tools and the increased bandwidth available from telecommunications services, will work together with the main asset team in the Reality Center facility using remote collaboration tools.

SGI servers are able to provide modular, scalable compute and graphics resources in a shared-memory architecture. SGI Reality Center facilities, therefore, can be used continuously for daytime collaborative-visualization purposes and after hours for compute-intensive tasks such as reservoir simulation and depth migration.

Images courtesy of Uyvind Hagen, Statoil, and Landmark Graphics Corporation