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Total upgrades Pangea's computing power to 6.7 petaflops

Xinhua, March 30, 2016 Adjust font size:

The multinational industrial giant Total announced Tuesday in a press release a boost of its supercomputer Pangea's computing power from 2.3 to 6.7 petaflops (or 6.7 quadrillions floating point operations per second), the equivalent of more than 80,000 laptops combined.

Total inaugurated Pangea, conceived by Silicon Graphics International (SGI) with a computing power of 2.3 petaflops and a storage capacity of 7 petabytes, in March 2013, in its Scientific and Technical Center in Pau, in South-West France. It was ranked in 2013 as the World's 14th most powerful computers.

According to Total, Pangea, with an investment of 60 million euros (67.7 million U.S. dollars) over four years, is a decision-support tool used for exploration and field management. Its objectives are among improving the accuracy of subsurface imaging, optimizing the development and production of fields and shortening the duration of studies.

"We tripled Pangea's computing power in just two years. In the era of big data, state-of-the-art data intensive computing is a competitive advantage. This power will help us to improve our performance and to reduce our costs," mentioned Arnaud Breuillac, President Total Exploration and Production.

This Supercomputer requires a power supply of 4.5 MegaWatts, a heat source which is reused to heat Total's buildings in Pau, France.

The upgrade will enable images from increasingly complex regions and numerical simulations of fields with 4D seismic data, which consists of repeating 3D seismic surveys over time across the same area, Total said.

Created in 1924, Total is a French multinational with operations in more than 130 countries and about 96,000 employees. Endit