International exploration and production firm BG Brasil is raising the supercomputing profile of Latin America with the launch of an SGI supercomputer that is expected to "revolutionize seismic data processing" in the region. Last week BG Brasil and Senai CIMATEC officially welcomed the new machine, named "CIMATEC Yemoja" after a local Afro-Brazilian deity, and debuted their new world-class center of excellence in computing program, which together comprise a total investment of about $20 million.

Designed by BG Group in partnership with the Federation of Industries of the State of Bahia, the 400-teraflops (LINPACK) SGI ICE X cluster is installed at the Senai CIMATEC Supercomputing Center for Industrial Innovation in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The system is a key milestone for BG's R&D program, which centers on geophysics workloads like seismic imaging and modeling of complex oil and gas fields, and more specifically, development of the petroleum-rich pre-salt layers of the Brazilian continental shelf. Independent energy analysts have placed the total volume of pre-salt recoverable oil and natural gas reserves at more than 50 billion barrels of oil equivalent - that's three-and-a-half times Brazil's current national reserve of 15 billion barrels.

"The complexity of the pre-salt fields drives us to seek increasingly innovative solutions," reported BG South America CEO Nelson Silva in an official statement. "The supercomputer is part of this effort and will assist us in our daily activities in the oil and gas industry. Our goal is to champion innovation in Brazil, promoting globally competitive, technologically based local content."

Nelson had earlier characterized the project as "a unique opportunity for the Brazilian oil and gas industry [that] align[s] with the interests of the country."

Project participants have joined together under the banner of the International Inversion Initiative consortium, to apply their talents to optimizing Full Waveform Inversion (FWI), one of the principle methodologies for the processing of industrial-scale 3D and 4D seismic data. Led by BG Brasil, the consortium includes the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), the University of British Columbia and Imperial College London.

"This project illustrates the innovative environment in Brazil which is stimulating research partnerships of global significance," shared Rick Moore, CTO of BG Group. "The supercomputer will give BG and leading university research groups the strategic infrastructure to resolve major industry challenges in reservoir imaging and data processing. This was made possible through the R&D levy in alignment with ANP, federal and state funding."

Even in a time of increased system heterogeneity, many of the oil and gas machines announced in recent years have been straight x86 clusters. That's not the case with BG and CIMATEC, which equipped their SGI ICE X system with Intel Xeon E5-2690V2 (10-core) processors as well as Phi parts. The machine has 17,200 CPU cores, more than 2 petabytes of disk storage with 18 gigabytes per second I/O, interconnected by FDR InfiniBand. CIMATEC Yemoja is currently the fastest system in Latin America and 124th in the world ranking of the TOP500 supercomputers.

"SGI is pleased to establish a partnership with SENAI to create a regional innovation ecosystem," said Jorge Titinger, SGI CEO. "The implementation of our system will bring direct benefits to the oil and energy exploration industry, allowing researchers to perform highly sophisticated analysis and seismic data visualization."

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