Intel Corporation has opened its first solution center worldwide, dedicated to the oil, gas and energy sector. The new Energy Competency Center (ECC) is situated at the Center of Excellence for applied Research and Training (CERT) in the city of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), currently ranked third in the world for proven oil reserves.
Combining Intel’s recognized technology and industry leadership with the advanced oil and gas technical capabilities of this region, the center will provide an environment for companies to develop, showcase and test solutions using the Intel Architecture platform.
In an increasingly competitive market, Intel Architecture based solutions provide the low cost, high performance technology needed to generate cost saving and provide a tangible competitive edge.
A joint venture with IBM, the center provides access to breakthrough technologies and technical knowledge transfer. Specific resources include: cluster scalability exercises, application benchmarking, cluster training, solutions development testing and showcasing. It is expected that exploration and development companies and their solution providers will be the first to benefit from the facility and will use it to further expand IT competency in the energy sector.
The center will be equipped with clustering nodes, based on Intel Xeon and Intel Itanium2 processors, linked by fast interconnect systems and specifically designed to offer the high performance technical computing solutions that are key to the strategic operations of seismic simulation and reservoir mapping in the oil and gas industry. On the software side Intel is closely cooperating with other key players in the oil, gas and energy sectors.
The ECC is located within the facilities of the University of Petroleum at CERT, the only such facility in the region. One of its primary functions is to provide education forums on how to develop, manage, optimize and exploit distributed computing models that can be used for the oil, gas and energy industry.
Many parts of the Energy sector are in transition from closed, proprietary computing systems to open industry standards, which provide higher performance at less cost, access to a greater number of hardware, software and systems integrators, and the flexibility to adapt to new circumstances.
Saudi Aramco is one company that has already made the transition to Intel processor-based clustering technology. Faced with seismic data volumes doubling every year, it ported its Prestack Time Migration (PSTM) applications, used to ‘clean’ seismic data from a RISC platform to a cluster of 1,800 Intel Pentium III processors. The new and fully scalable solution is already delivering a 30 percent increase in performance and at a fraction of the cost.
Intel delivers the building blocks and technology that enables “end-to-any” solutions including wireless devices, PCs, workstations and servers and Intel is working with the world’s leading energy service providers to port proprietary solutions onto Intel architecture.
Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, is also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking and communications products. — (menareport.com)
© 2002 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
