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Oil, gas and energy company Total is turning to supercomputing to identify new oil and gas prospects, as the energy game heats up around the world.

It has commissioned high performance computing (HPC) company SGI to build a computer that can deliver 2.3 petaflops per second, which once developed will be the fastest supercomputer in the world used in a commercial setting.

It will be used for representing strata – layers of material – and visualizing accumulations, allowing Total geoscientists, geophysicists, geologists and reservoir engineers to gain a full view of the exploration environment.

In recent years oil and gas companies have been moving further and deeper offshore, and have started exploring more difficult terrain, including oil sands, to discover new oil and gas reserves as traditional wells dry up.

Getting the right data can help companies like Total avoid costly decisions in terms of locating new oil and gas installations.

SGI CEO Ron Verdoorn said SGI’s system, containing its ICE X servers, will greatly increase Total’s ability to process the large amounts of data that come about with such exploration.

“The needs for compute-intensive data processing in the oil and gas industry are constantly increasing,” Verdoorn said.

“With data files exceeding ten petabytes, technological innovation for reservoir modelling and simulation relies not only on compute architectures but also on storage architectures.”

SGI will offer a complete integrated solution including compute, storage and services at Total’s Jean Feger Scientfic Technical Centre in Pau, southwest France.