Qlogic SilverStorm 9020 Manual

CASE STUDY
Revolutionizing
Reservoir
Simulation With
SilverStorm
Most top oil and gas companies have established comprehensive research
and development facilities encompassing the fields of petroleum geology,
drilling, production, gathering and transportation, machinery, and instrumenta-
tion. Over the past half-century, these companies have invested over a billion
dollars in scientific and technological capital for research and development
with a profitable five times (or more) return on their investment.
The Problem
For most companies, modeling geophysical phenomenon takes large, expensive systems
and days of computation to render a result.
In the oil and gas industry, by the time the result has been delivered and confirmed, re-
serves could go dry. This interruption of output flow is extremely costly to oil companies
as it has ramifications all the way to the end customers who use the petroleum products.
Quite often, when computations take too long or results are inaccurate, competitors dis-
cover, lease, and tap the oil field first, costing the company millions in lost revenues.
No successful company can afford either of these scenarios, but, as with all companies,
they also need to watch the costs of bringing in a new solution. The typical processing
environment, which often consists of several large, monolithic mainframe servers, is not
able to complete the simulations rapidly enough to meet their business requirements.
The Customer
One large oil and gas company, ranked as one of the highest producers of petroleum
products worldwide, chose SilverStorm Technologies as their networking partner to de-
ploy their next generation IT infrastructure.
This top oil and gas company began looking for a high performance clustering solution
that would provide the speed, low latency, and scalability they needed, both now and
into the future. After extensive testing in their development lab, this company chose the
SilverStorm solution.
The Test Environment
They tested their solution using the SilverStorm 3000 InfiniBand switch combined with
Fabric Access software to connect ten Itanium-2 based servers with PCI-X HCAs all run-
ning RedHat Linux. The company was extremely pleased with both the results of the
performance tests and the expert technical support they received.
The Production Solution
“We were not able to meet our performance needs with any other interconnect solution
we tested so we turned to a high performance solution with SilverStorm providing the
Results
•Simulations complete in half the time with three times the com-
putational throughput
•3 year ROI of 150%
Executive Summary
Competition in all industries is fierce. This is especially true
for the oil and gas industry where the ability to accurately and
quickly track and forecast supply ratios, model geophysical
phenomenon, and develop safe, efficient instruments and
tools is vital to company viability.
Top oil and gas companies, in partnership with SilverStorm
Technologies, acquire high performance clustering solutions
that will allow them to achieve their performance, efficiency,
and data integrity goals, thereby improving overall business
performance.

CASE STUDY
Revolutionizing Reservoir Simulation With SilverStorm
interconnect. We found the transport performance to be impressive with the High
Performance Linpack (HPL) results over 82%. We were especially pleased with the
performance handling large packets. In addition, when we ran into problems with
the MPI layer of our application, SilverStorm quickly helped us resolve the issue
to get us up and running,” reported the customer. Today, the SilverStorm solution
is operational, supporting over 120 Itanium-2 nodes and is expected to double by
the end of the year. They have already started migrating other simulations over to
their high performance cluster to take advantage of the flexibility, scalability, and
efficiency of the environment.
The Customer Benefit
This leading oil and gas company has had the SilverStorm solution opera-
tional in their data center since September 2004. Simulations are finishing in
one-half to one-third the time they used to, providing them with three times
the computational throughput. They are already realizing business growth directly
associated with the performance improvements they are experiencing with the
SilverStorm solution. This oil and gas company, who never invests in technology
without the expectation of significant return on their investment, expects a three
year ROI exceeding 150%.
Conclusion
SilverStorm’s professional, dedicated and expert staff supplied this company with
a working solution in less than two days—even resolving problems in non-Silver-
Storm software. SilverStorm’s high performance solution now provides this oil and
gas giant the ability to simulate their oil and gas reserves on a semi-realtime ba-
sis, thereby significantly improving working efficiency and improving their business
performance. “We will definitely look to SilverStorm for efficient, high performance
solutions in the future.”
© 2006 QLogic Corp.All Rights Reserved. QLogic and the QLogic Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of QLogic Corporation. All other brands and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Information supplied
by QLogic Corporation is believed to be accurate and reliable. QLogic Corporation assumes no responsibility for any errors in this brochure.
SN0130928-00 Rev A 12/06
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