[ Thanks to Tony
McCallie for this link. ]
“Petrochemical giant BP has purchased a large cluster of
Hewlett-Packard Linux servers using Intel’s Itanium 2 processors to
help search for oil and gas deposits.“BP bought 259 HP rx5670 systems, each with four Itanium 2
processors. The systems collectively have more than 8,000GB of
memory and can perform 4 trillion calculations per second,
according to HP and Intel. The purchase price was not
disclosed.“The computing cluster will be used for the computationally
difficult task of seismic processing, in which computers deduce 3D
models of what lies beneath the Earth’s surface–petrochemicals,
for example. They reconstruct these interior features by analyzing
how fast sound waves from a man-made explosion travel through
different materials before reaching an array of sensitive
detectors…”