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Photos: DownUnder's Perth supercomputer

Crunching data for the global oil and gas industry.

on Oct 22 2012 7:06AM

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Welcome to the DownUnder GeoSolutions' supercomputer in Perth. This machine crunches seismic data predominantly for mid-cap oil and gas companies, but sometimes also for multinationals that don't have enough capacity at their own facility. Customers have included Apache, Inpex, Total and Santos.

The supercomputer currently consists of SGI servers running 25,000 CPUs and five petabytes of storage, but will soon be doubled as Dugeo takes on a more complex form of processing, RTM (Reverse Time Migration).

Oil and gas companies pay Dugeo to run algorithms that compare "known" and "observed" seismic data to make more accurate predictions on where to sink a drill. It is a high stakes game — marine oil rigs cost between $50m and $200m, no effort is spared to reduce the margin of error.

Located between two hospitals (for reliable access to multiple substations), Dugeo's supercomputer sits in a non-descript suburban building.

The supercomputer is made up of commodity servers and storage. Founder and managing director Dr Matthew Lamont notes that it would cost five times the price to buy specialised SMP equipment. Mind you, that's come down from a 20:1 ratio when the first generation of this supercomputer was built.

Dugeo runs a Linux-based clustered file system called LUSTRE, used by 15 of the world's top 30 supercomputers.

Jobs on the supercomputer are project-based. The smallest job might be 100TB and the R&D team is continually looking at ways to get large amounts of data on and off a system faster.

"We hammer IO like you wouldn’t believe," says DownUnder GeoSolutions CTO Stuart Midgley. "We have five petabytes of storage and we turn every byte over every couple of months. We keep very little archival data on spinning disk. We can sustain 20 Gbps of IO between the cluster and the spinning disk, 24 hours a day. That’s gigabytes per second."

The machines are water-cooled from pipes that rise up under a raised floor. Here you can see the cooling apparatus built into the rear of a rack.

From a floorspace perspective , past expansions to Dugeo's supercomputer have been sustained in its Subiaco data centre, largely due to the impacts of Moore's Law. But the RTM project — which will double the compute requirement — and the escalating price of power now has the company exploring other options, including moving its computing services offshore.

Dugeo has looked into using co-lo data centres, but none of them are interested in 30KW racks. Cloud services like Amazon, meanwhile, have high data transfer charges and hard data storage limits. "We tried hard to find a bureau service," says MD Dr Lamont. "The last thing we need is to own machines. But you just can’t do it. You just can’t afford them — the price point of bureaus is crazy, I remember getting a quote from a mob that offered 440 CPUs, a big cluster at that time, we could hire that for two months or buy or install our own."

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