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성공사례 - Marathon Oil Corporation
The AMD Opteron™ Processor Helps Marathon Improve Oil & Gas Production
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Marathon Oil Corporation
http://www.marathon.com
"The AMD Opteron™ processor has proven to be highly complementary to our operations,"said Dr. Tom R. Evans, Senior Technical Consultant, Seismic and System Services, Marathon Oil Corporation."For instance, we can process our seismic data up to four times faster at one-third the cost—and deal with the rapidly increasing volume of data and the complexity of problems to be solved. This has directly contributed to Marathon completing successful wells, particularly in our Oklahoma program. "
Challenge:
- Marathon Oil Corporation conducts complex seismic processing and imaging,
visualization and interpretation in order to successfully drill new wells for oil and
gas production.
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Market conditions—competition for access to resources, increased amounts of
data, and an aging expert population—dictated a new kind of IT infrastructure for
the company.
-
Marathon Seismic and System Services Senior Technical Consultant Dr. Tom R.
Evans and his team created an innovative thin client model to address these
concerns. In order to build it, the company was searching for the industry’s best
price/performance, as well as flexibility in order to ensure a best-of-breed IT
environment.
Solution:
-
Marathon deployed the AMD Opteron™ processor throughout its
infrastructure, including:
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Appro clusters based on AMD Opteron processors to conduct its seismic
processing and imaging;
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AMD Opteron processor-powered HP xw9300 Workstations for its visualization
desktops, thin client visualization and visualization center; and
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AMD Opteron processor-based IBM® BladeCenter LS20 servers to support
information delivery to thin clients.
Impact:
- Marathon can now run projects up to four times faster at one-third the cost,
directly contributing to Marathon completing successful wells.
-
The AMD Opteron™ processor has contributed to increased flexibility and
security, helping Marathon to realize exceptional efficiencies through its
restructured information delivery methodology.
-
AMD’s technology approach afforded Marathon freedom of choice, allowing the
company to leverage and incorporate multiple vendors’ hardware and software
technologies into its infrastructure.
Organizational Profile
Marathon Oil Corporation is engaged in the worldwide exploration and production of
crude oil and natural gas, as well as the domestic refining, marketing and
transportation of petroleum products. Headquartered in Houston, Texas, Marathon is
among the leading energy industry players, applying innovative technologies to
discover valuable energy resources and deliver the highest quality products to the
marketplace. With operations that embrace three continents, Marathon strives to be
the company of choice for applicable investors, partners, customers, neighbors and
employees. For more information about Marathon, visit www.Marathon.com.
Challenge
Seismic acquisition, processing and imaging are critical components in today’s
petroleum exploration and development workflow. This workflow or seismic data
analysis is a time- and resource-intensive process in which technology can and must
play a critical role in helping to provide quality and efficiency at a competitive cost.
Once an area, or lease, has been identified as potentially prospective for oil and gas,
Marathon must take the following next steps as part of the seismic workflow:
1. Seismic processing and imaging: Vast amounts of data, often many
terabytes, are collected for each seismic survey taken in pursuit of a new
prospect or a proposed field development. The data is extensively analyzed,
processed, and imaged to produce a three-dimensional (3D) picture of the
subsurface. The process utilizes advanced imaging technologies which are
incredibly compute-intensive.
2. Visualization: Once the image is established, it is viewed in the context of
an earth model to analyze and then create a business case for drilling. A
database gives context such as reference locations, drilling entitlements, and
other wells in the area. Then state-of-the-art information systems render the
3D image in order to allow dynamic viewing, editing and interpreting of the
resulting image. This is a highly compute- and graphics-intensive process
given the complexity and volume of data being analyzed.
3. Interpretation: Given a final composite seismic image and the input from
visualization, the results are then interpreted to produce a three-dimensional
model representation of the subsurface which can be integrated with rock
properties derived from well data, field analogues or the seismic data itself.
The result is then analyzed for commercial viability prior to a final decision to
commit further significant risk money to drilling and/or developing it as a
field. Information technology at this stage of the workflow must be very
flexible, allowing easy local and remote access to the data as diverse and
sometimes remote expertise is employed to produce the final products for
commercial decision-making.
The petroleum industry is constantly being thrown new challenges that need to be
addressed through improvements to Marathon’s systems.
“Time is money. Exploration and production is a capital-intensive business that takes
time, and often many projects, to establish a commercial field. If you are not there
first, armed with your subsurface information provided through your technical
computing environment, your competitor will be,” said Marathon Seismic and System
Services Senior Technical Consultant Dr. Tom R. Evans.
The data-intensive components of the workflow needed to be addressed in the
context of three specific industry trends that were causing information technology
concerns:
1. Competition for increasingly fewer new hydrocarbon opportunities which,
together with the hydrocarbon traps which are increasingly more challenging
to define, is a significant task for the industry today. Technology’s role,
enabled through state-of-the-art information technology, is to utilize
emerging compute-intensive seismic imaging algorithms to illuminate the
most challenging subsurface characterization problems. Given the competitive
nature of the business, the work must be undertaken rapidly and to a high
degree of accuracy—again pushing information technology to its limits.
2. Modern petroleum exploration and development is seeing a drastic increase in
the volumes of data required for today’s problems. Information technology
resources capable of handling and processing several terabytes of data per
project are required.
3. Finally, the petroleum industry is faced with an acute demographic problem—
its experts are aging, and increasingly it is necessary to accommodate a more
virtual approach to getting the work completed. Again, from an IT
perspective, systems would need to change to allow a much greater flexibility
in terms of wide area access to computing resources and rapid establishment
of satellite offices, without sacrificing performance, functionality or security.
An innovative thin client model was a solution devised in close cooperation with an
industry-leading provider of petroleum exploration software. At the core of the
proposed architecture was a group of powerful cluster-based processors that could
rapidly crunch ever-growing massive amounts of information in a cost- and timeefficient
manner. The thin client and high performance visualization systems were
designed to be wrapped around the processing core to deliver the processed, imaged
and composite data to users quickly—regardless of their locations.
With the vision established, Marathon and its technology partners planned to execute
upon it. The company sought leading-edge systems architecture with high
performance and reliability, at a competitive price/performance.
Solution
Marathon conducted exhaustive benchmarks and tests focused primarily on price,
performance, and the ability to use a common processing architecture throughout its
technical computing environment. Marathon found that the AMD Opteron™ processor
could meet the company’s criteria regardless of the hardware or software on which it
was running. This allowed Marathon to base its foundation on AMD64 technology and
implement the most ideal set of workstations and servers to meet specific goals—
even if they were from different companies.
Marathon implemented the following technologies:
1) The core systems were Appro clusters based on AMD Opteron processors to
conduct its compute-intensive seismic processing and imaging;
2) AMD Opteron processor-powered HP xw9300 Workstations for its visualization
desktops, thin client visualization and visualization center; and
3) AMD Opteron processor-based IBM® BladeCenter LS20 servers to support
information delivery to thin clients.
Impact
“The AMD Opteron processor has proven to be highly complementary to our
operations. For instance, we can process our seismic data up to four times faster at
one-third the cost—and deal with the rapidly increasing volume of data and the
complexity of problems to be solved,” said Evans. “This has directly contributed to
Marathon completing successful wells, particularly in our Oklahoma program.”
The AMD Opteron processor has also provided both flexibility and security, helping
Marathon to realize exceptional efficiencies through its restructured information
delivery methodology.
“Marathon has some technical computing software which
requires Linux® while other systems only work with Microsoft® Windows®. With a
thin client environment based on AMD, which is equally optimized with competing
software and hardware vendors, it doesn’t matter. We can easily set individual
blades to support specific operating systems as opposed to maintaining multiple
desktop environments,” said Evans.
“Our infrastructure includes various technologies and AMD serves as the common
denominator. AMD’s approach allowed us important freedom of choice, leveraging
and incorporating multiple vendors’ hardware and software technologies into our
infrastructure,” said Evans. “It is doubtful we would have been able to create such an
ideal environment if the processor was proprietary or optimized for one hardware or
software vendor over another.”
“The AMD Opteron processor has proven to be highly complementary to our
operations. For instance, we can process our seismic data up to four times faster at
one-third the cost—and deal with the rapidly increasing volume of data and the
complexity of problems to be solved. This has directly contributed to Marathon
completing successful wells, particularly in our Oklahoma program.”
—Dr. Tom R. Evans, Senior Technical Consultant, Seismic and System Services,
Marathon Oil Corporation
About AMD
Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) is a leading global provider of innovative
processing solutions in the computing, graphics and consumer electronics markets.
AMD is dedicated to driving open innovation, choice and industry growth by
delivering superior customer-centric solutions that empower consumers and
businesses worldwide. For more information, visit www.amd.com.
AMD, AMD Opteron, the AMD Arrow logo, and combinations thereof, are trademarks of
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft
Corporation in the United States and/or other jurisdictions.
Linux is a registered trademark of
Linus Torvalds. Other names are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of
their respective owners. |
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