Major Oil and Gas Software Providers Integrate with Altair PBS Professional®

HPC scheduling and workload management solution accelerates compute-intensive applications for fuel exploration and low-impact extraction

News provided by

Altair

Oct 23, 2014, 10:00 ET

TROY, Mich., Oct. 23, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Altair today announced that six industry-leading oil and gas technology companies have completed integrations for their key applications to support PBS Professional®, Altair's workload manager and job scheduler for high-performance computing (HPC).

Used by thousands of companies worldwide, PBS Professional enables engineers in HPC environments to improve productivity, optimize resource utilization and efficiency, and simplify the process of cluster workload management.

"The new dynamics of oil and gas exploration across North America and the changing geopolitical environment globally demand faster, more flexible and more productive operations in the energy industry's high-performance environments," said Sam Mahalingam, Chief Technical Officer for Enterprise Solutions, Altair. "Altair is a leader in optimizing complex and demanding HPC environments, and oil and gas operators rely on PBS Professional to gain more efficiencies from their computing investments. Likewise, world leaders in HPC end-user software recognize that supporting PBS Professional will help improve their client satisfaction and implementation opportunities."

The following oil and gas technology firms now support PBS Professional:

Computer Modeling Group Limited (CMGL) has integrated PBS Professional with its reservoir simulation software suite which is used to obtain history matches and forecasts of primary, secondary and enhanced or improved oil recovery processes.
Emerson Process Management has integrated PBS Professional with its new Roxar Tempest™ 7.1, an integrated reservoir engineering software suite that provides a single, consistent interface to exploration and production reservoir engineers.
Paradigm has integrated the Paradigm® Echos® seismic processing and imaging system with PBS Professional; Echos translates seismic data into highly accurate, high-definition images of the subsurface.
Petroleum Experts (Petex) now supports PBS Professional for RESOLVE, a master controller to communicate and control the links among reservoir simulators, process simulators, transient pipeline simulation, third-party software and such proprietary tools as the Petex Integrated Production Modeling (IPM™) software suite for the design of reservoir tanks, wells and surface gathering systems.
Rock Flow Dynamics supports PBS Professional with tNavigator software for reservoir engineering and simulation, running dynamic reservoir simulations on engineers' laptops, servers, and HPC clusters.
Schlumberger continues to support their ECLIPSE integration with PBS Professional, which was described in a white paper published by Schlumberger in 2013.

"Users need our software to operate seamlessly with their workload management systems, so integration with leading HPC vendors like Altair is critical to serving our clients well," said Kirill Bogachev, CTO, Rock Flow Dynamics. "For example, one of our biggest customers recently switched to PBS Professional based on its superior support as well as cost optimization. PBS Professional is fully integrated with our reservoir simulation software so users can be sure of optimal throughput and performance."

Robert Frost, head of Roxar software development, said "Emerson is very pleased with the integration of PBS Professional into Tempest. Reservoir engineers benefit from a simple interface to the power of cluster computing including license counting. Altair's helpful and responsive technical support made for a smooth and efficient development."

"Resource scheduling solutions are critical for large scale seismic processing and imaging workload management," said Richard Eperjesi, Director, Product Management for Seismic Processing and Imaging at Paradigm. "For this reason, we have fully integrated the Paradigm Echos seismic processing system with PBS Professional to ensure users have the necessary scheduling capability for optimal use of compute resources. As a result of this integration, we see value for our customers when it's necessary to adjust priorities within processing projects, within complete analytic workflows and for standardized reporting for business analytics."

Much of the computational work in oil and gas, notably seismic processing and reservoir simulation, is compute-intensive, so oil and gas companies have long been early adopters of compute clusters and other HPC systems. As companies apply these advanced technologies to support larger and more complex classes of problems, products like PBS Professional are playing an increasingly important role.

Altair HPC thought leaders will address this trend, the business relevance, and its technology collaborations at numerous oil and gas industry events including the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) 2014 International Exposition in Denver, Colo., on Oct. 26-31. At SEG Altair will deliver presentations at four sessions to demonstrate how PBS Professional can support engineering in the energy arena. Topics include:

Leveraging HPC for deep-sea component engineering, in a joint presentation with Cray
Simplifying the management of HPC application environments
A recipe for getting started with HPC clusters
Speeding up reservoir processing with end-to-end workload management

On September 2 and September 24, Altair conducted ATCx Energy conferences in Aberdeen, Scotland and Houston, Texas as part of its commitment to provide the tools and expertise that will continue to enable and accelerate the innovation that is critical to the energy industry.

Altair also recently sponsored the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (EAGE) HPC Workshop in Crete, Greece, exploring advancements and future developments of the key applications used in the upstream industry coupled with required HPC technologies.

Altair will be sponsoring the SeisSpace/ProMAX User Group Meetings in Highlands Ranch, Colorado on November 18 - 19, 2014 and in Guildford, England on December 2-3, 2014. Altair will also be exhibiting at Supercomputing (SC) 2014 in New Orleans November 17-20, with live product demos and free hands-on tutorials in booth 2231. Visit Altair's SC site for details.

For more information on PBS Professional and its benefits for users in the energy industry, please visit the oil and gas solutions section at www.pbsworks.com.

About Altair

Altair is focused on the development and broad application of simulation technology to synthesize and optimize designs, processes and decisions for improved business performance. Privately held with more than 2,300 employees, Altair is headquartered in Troy, Michigan, USA, and operates more than 45 offices throughout 23 countries. Today, Altair serves more than 5,000 corporate clients across broad industry segments. To learn more, please visit www.altair.com.

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SOURCE Altair