Total using GridwiseTech's expertise in processing large data

Total Group is the fourth largest oil and gas company in the world. It operates in over 130 countries and has more than 96 000 employees worldwide.

The Geoscience Research Centre (GRC), located in Aberdeen Scotland, plays an important role in research and development for Total Exploration and Production worldwide.  Their geologists, geophysicists and reservoir engineer’s work together to develop and test new techniques in areas such as history matching, fault and sedimentary modeling, seismic for reservoir and pore network modeling.

Engineers and geoscientists from the GRC use seismic, geo-models and reservoir simulation models to improve our knowledge of how petroleum reservoirs behave during production and their potential to deliver. These activities generate large amounts of data and computations. To carry out their research the GRC needs to get the most from its available computing resources. Tools for distributing and managing tasks across the infrastructure are essential; these come together as a workload management system.

The GRC team understood that their existing workload management system was not meeting the challenges of their daily requirements. GRC commissioned GridwiseTech to evaluate options available on the market and recommend a workload management system specific to their departments needs. GridwiseTech delivered a diagnosis report which investigated the marketplace for possible solutions, and gave two recommended architectures meeting GRC’s goals. With GRC’s complete list of 38 requirements, they evaluated a broad range of workload management products—including the market leaders: Platform LSF, Sun Grid Engine, Moab from Cluster Resources Inc, Univa Unicluster, PBS Pro from Altair, Condor High-Throughput Computing System and IBM’s LoadLeveler—for their adequacy and effectiveness. They gave GRC strategic guidance on a business level, as well as vendor-neutral guidance concerning workload management systems. All possible solutions were ranked for their adequacy and two complete architectures identified and arranged in a comprehensive work plan.

Richard Rivenq, Head of Reservoir Engineering at Geoscience Research Centre said:
„We selected GridwiseTech due to their vendor independence, as we wanted an unbiased appraisal of the options available. GridwiseTech provided us with a detailed break down of the options available from the different vendors in the workload management system market and which options meet our department’s specific requirements. The report was delivered in a professional and timely manner, and based on the recommendations made in their report we were confident in choosing the system to manage our infrastructure.”

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