IBM, Partners Claim Energy Simulation Record 

IBM, NVIDIA, and Stone Ridge Technology today reported setting the performance record for a “billion cell” oil and gas reservoir simulation.

Using IBM Minsky servers with NVIDIA P100 GPUs and Stone Ridge’s ECHELON petroleum reservoir simulation software, the trio claim their effort “shatters previous (Exxon) results using one-tenth the power and 1/100th of the space. The results were achieved in 92 minutes with 60 Power processors and 120 GPU accelerators and broke the previous published record (Aramco) of 20 hours using thousands of processors.”

The ‘billion cell” simulation represents a heady challenge typically tackled with ‘supercomputer’ class HPC infrastructure. The Minsky, of course, is the top of IBM’s Power server line and leverages NVIDIA’s fastest GPU and NVlink interconnect. This simulation used 60 processors and 120 accelerators. IBM owed the systems – each Minsky had 2 Power8 CPUs with 256GB of memory, 4 NVIDIA P100 GPUs, InfiniBand EDR.

The ‘billion cell” simulation represents a heady challenge typically tackled with ‘supercomputer’ class HPC infrastructure.

Read the full story at sister website HPCwire.