Univa Solutions For Energy / Oil & Gas

Univa's grid and cluster computing solutions can be brought to bear in the evolving IT ecosystem of Energy / Oil & Gas companies to reduce the time to process and analyze data so that more accurate operational exploration and production (E&P) decisions can be made earlier.

Grid and cluster technology enables companies to harness underutilized computing capacity across the corporation, so you make better use of existing capital investments to deliver:

• Substantially reduced data processing timeframes
• Reduced total cost of infrastructure with improved hardware ROI
• Streamlined workflow and resource allocation - for optimized systems management and IT performance
• Improved user collaboration and job satisfaction for increased retention
• Improved analyses for faster, better decision-making

Grid technology is being adopted in E&P to assist in compressing decision making processes – with Univa capabilities, time to reach key decisions are significantly reduced as supporting IT tools are optimized. Univa leverages best practices from our significant success in a wide range of HPC usage areas across multiple industries to deliver proven, successful grid solutions to Oil & Gas clients.

In addition, Univa is partnered with the top service providers in the industry to ensure our solutions will integrate seamlessly with your existing environment.

Global oil & gas, mining, and services companies are in strong competition to find replacement reserves from an increasingly challenging number of prospects, and data-intensive technologies are at the forefront of these efforts. These new technologies, both proprietary and vendor-supplied (such as high-end visualization, 4D seismic technology, processing and interpretation) require an expanding level of computing power.

Our Oil & Gas clients are finding more and more ways to leverage grid and cluster solutions in the lab and within the mainstream IT environment. Our solutions deliver a range of benefits to:

• End Users – Application users can achieve better performance for critical HPC applications, resulting in productivity gains through improved Reservoir Simulation time-to-solution and finer-grained mesh for improved model fidelity. In addition, collaboration among users and asset teams is enhanced with easy access to archived best practices from common HPC job interfaces, as well as capabilities for improved workflow. Univa provides transparent operation while retaining end user autonomy – so the user stays in control but is less involved with the underlying IT infrastructure.
• IT Managers – With the centralized HPC management enabled by Univa solutions, operational efficiency is enhanced and resource utilization is optimized. In addition, Univa solutions enable policy and SLA-based resource allocation, so application performance is enhanced. Our solutions let companies optimize the overall IT budget through improved visibility into utilization patterns.
• Financial and Executive – With increased visibility into how assets are being utilized, companies can make better budget decisions. In addition, Univa solutions enable usage-based accounting so that accurate pay-per-use can be achieved.

In addition, Univa's alliances with key software vendors ensure that your most critical applications will operate at a highly increased rate of productivity.

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• More

Univa has the proven technology to reduce application runtimes so that geoscientists and engineers can access valuable results in hours or minutes rather than days.

Specific use cases include:

• Streamlining Enterprise Data Processing
• Optimizing IT Infrastructure
• Accounting for Resources
• Accelerating HPC Applications

Streamlining Enterprise Data Processing

Most Oil & Gas Majors and Independents as well as services companies operate a high-performance computing (HPC) environment consisting of large dedicated clusters running compute-intensive seismic data processing and reservoir simulation applications. This environment is typically highly heterogeneous, with a range of multi-vendor systems involved, and can also often be widely geographically dispersed.

The industry has learned that such an environment is complex, time-consuming, and costly to operate. Expensive resources go underutilized – including both dedicated hardware systems and costly HPC application licenses. In addition, geophysicists and engineers must deal with the intricacies of the underlying computing infrastructure, which takes their time and energy away from the core business.

With Univa, Oil & Gas customers can streamline their operations to make better use of existing resources. Our solutions enable scheduling across disparate resources and increase availability for all HPC applications. Univa solutions virtualize the infrastructure to create a shared pool of capacity, so that the complexities of the underlying environment are abstracted away from the end user. This provides the centralization, visibility and control to achieve a higher level of productivity.

Optimizing IT Infrastructure

From network interpretation workstations to team rooms to the enterprise data centers, the complexity and heterogeneity of Oil & Gas IT organizations is growing. These facilities are costly to own and operate, whether used to power corporate ERP systems or E&P data analysis.

With Univa solutions, companies can simplify the environment and drive out unnecessary costs, so that budget can be spent in more value added areas of the business.

Accounting for Resources

For large E&P companies looking to justify HPC purchases and maximize their capital budget, a lack of visibility into utilization rates means less informed decision-making. These companies typically own and operate large, diverse infrastructures that are growing in complexity, with silos of clusters and other HPC resources. In addition, the broad range of users and applications across multiple geographically dispersed sites adds to the complexity of the environment – and makes it more difficult to account for which resources are used when, how, and by whom. Thus, the ability to make accurate spending decisions is diminished.

With Univa's solutions, companies have comprehensive visibility across disparate, broadly dispersed devices. Univa solutions enable enterprise-wide capacity and utilization analytics, so that companies can execute fact-based capacity planning, improve productivity through reallocated resources, optimize hardware and software spending, and make fully informed HPC strategy decisions.

Accelerating HPC Applications

When IT constraints bottleneck your scientists' ability to process data quickly, your business is impacted. So most Oil & Gas companies spend increasing amounts on HPC resources – in fact, this industry is one of the top consumers of HPC. But buying more hardware is not a scalable model – budget and IT complexity constraints are driving companies to seek new ways of delivering the capacity needed to power their E&P operations.

With Univa, Oil & Gas companies can dramatically increase processing capacity and application throughput. With our grid and cluster products, you'll unlock hidden capacity to power processing at new levels, without an investment in costly hardware.