Background

The Bureau of Geophysical Prospecting (BGP), a wholly owned subsidiary of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), is one of the world’s leading geophysical service companies. It has a workforce of approximately 26,000 employees, including over 3,000 IT professionals and 300 software development engineers. BGP owns 23 processing centers around the globe, with a computing capability reaching about 2 PFlops and storage capacity exceeding 25 PB. BGP specializes in land and shallow sea seismic data acquisition, processing, and interpretation, as well as reservoir geophysics, borehole seismic, micro-seismic, GME and multi-client surveys, equipment manufacturing, and software R&D. The company operates in 34 countries and regions and ranks first in the global land seismic prospecting market.

Challenges

Seismic data processing is a typical application that heavily relies on floating-point computation and uses the wave equation as the major computing mode. It requires strong floating-point computing capabilities, moderately consumes memory bandwidth, and calls for exceptional multi-core scalability for mass shot gather processing, as well as superb concurrent I/O performance and read and write efficiency.

Solution

Huawei provided BGP with a parallel cluster system that consists of 133 x Huawei RH2288H V3 servers, 40 TB OceanStor 9000, and 3 TB SSD storage systems. The computing performance reaches up to 24.96 TFlops, and LINPACK efficiency is 88 percent, greatly improving resource utilization. In addition, Huawei provided servers and Ethernet switches that are easy to manage and maintain.

Benefits

By deploying Huawei’s holistic High-Performance Computing (HPC) solutions, BGP has accelerated exploration and production, speeded up average service computing periods from days to hours, and dramatically reduced the error rate of the processing results.