BP Opens Houston Supercomputer Center
Calling it the world's largest supercomputer for commercial research, the energy giant said HP and Intel helped it increase its computing power to more than 2.2 petaflops, almost doubling its capability this year.
The new BP Center for High-Performance Computing is one more sign of Houston's central importance to the world's energy sector. The British energy company announced it had opened the facility in a three-story, 110,000-square-foot building at its Westlake campus. The building was constructed to withstand Gulf Coast weather events, reduce energy consumption, and accommodate future growth, according to BP.
It is "the world's largest supercomputer for commercial research" and will be a worldwide hub for processing and managing huge amounts of geophysical data, according to the company. Energy companies have used supercomputers for many years to analyze their seismic data, and this supercomputer is a colossus: BP's announcement said its total memory is 1,000 terabytes and has disk space of 23.5 petabytes, equivalent to more than 40,000 average laptop computers.
"BP's investment in this new supercomputing center not only highlights the increasingly high-tech nature of today’s global oil and gas industry,[but] it underscores our company's long-held belief in the vital role technology plays – and will continue to play – in solving the world's biggest energy challenges,” said Jackie Mutschler, who heads BP's Upstream Technology.
The announcement said BP has worked with HP and Intel to raise its computing power to more than 2.2 petaflops, almost doubling its capability this year.