[ Thanks to Dean for
this link. ]
“The new geophysical computer — which Conoco said boasts enough
storage capacity to house the complete U.S. Library of Congress —
was built entirely by an internal information technology and
engineering team headed by Dr. Alan Huffman, manager of the $27
billion company’s Seismic Imaging Technology Center. …the system
already has been used to analyze seismic data from the North Sea
and the Gulf of Mexico, where Conoco recently discovered oil and is
drilling two deep-water wells.”
“The supercomputer and its accompanying disk farm are located at
Conoco’s seismic computing facility in Ponca City, Okla. But the
new system has been designed in such a way that it’s accessible
from almost any Conoco substation, according to company officials.
Making that possible involved re-engineering the company’s seismic
software to run under Linux with a Java-based and XML-compatible
user interface.”
“We jumped on Linux because it had the flexibility to
customize to our needs,” Huffman said. In addition to
re-engineering its software, he added, Conoco designed the hardware
so that mini-clusters of processors can be split off for use by
geophysicists who want to process data at oil exploration
sites.”