To get some idea of the state of computing in the oil and gas industry today, realize that a considerable number of those in attendance at the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) annual conference, held November 9-14 in Las Vegas, were continuing their business trip on to Supercomputing 2008, November 15-21 in Austin, Texas.

Supercomputers today are assembled from thousands or even tens of thousands of microprocessors, and can consume as much electricity as a small city. Applications common to oil and gas exploration are as demanding — especially in terms of the sheer amounts of data involved — as any found in bioinformatics, computer-aided design (CAD), or financial services.

Greater availability of processing power means more than just faster running applications, it changes the way work gets done. In the CAD world today, for example, 3-D design and things like finite-element analysis are accomplished more iteratively, if not in parallel, rather than having to “throw it over the transom” at a prescribed design milestone.

At SEG, engineering solution provider Paradigm “unveiled” its Higher Order Workflow (H.O.W.) solution, which empowers collaboration across disciplines that include geophysics, geology, petrophysics, and engineering.

With an integrated software solution across E&P domains for subsurface analysis, said Duane Dopkin, Paradigm senior vice president of technology, concurrent execution of multidomain processes improves “reservoir property models through continuous correlation, calibration, and correction, enabling asset knowledge bases to develop and thrive.”

Another, equally important trend for petroleum E&P is that scientific and engineering applications that until recently required very powerful computers can today run on PC laptops. This has led to a certain democratization of scientific software in E&P, allowing smaller companies to have, or offer, a range of capabilities that formerly would have been beyond them.

For example, Seismic Micro-Technology (SMT) said its software allows geo-scientific interpretation, modeling, analytics, and data management, all in one integrated PC-based executable. With about 8,000 installed seats, the company said its Kingdom solution is suitable even for the individual consultant, who can acquire its capabilities at a fraction of the price for other packages.

The market for scientific software is evolving to reflect this bifurcation — between comprehensive tackling of ever-larger domain problems on the one hand and solutions for the common man on the other— and, again, it’s doing so along lines seen many times before, in software markets as diverse as production process control and enterprise-resources planning.

In other words, while the scientific software market has been dominated by UNIX/Linux, Microsoft is today playing a more significant role.

One market observer in attendance at SEG broke down the E&P scientific software market as including Halliburton/ Landmark, Schlumberger Information Solutions (SIS), and Paradigm, each of which supports UNIX/Linux platforms, and to a greater or lesser extent is also adopting Microsoft; and independent software vendors (ISVs) such as SMT, FusionGeo, JOA Oil & Gas, and CMG that are from the get-go committed to the Microsoft platform.

Thus, Microsoft enters as the low-cost vendor, targeting the midmarket and assembling an ISV application suite whose providers it supports with technology as well as with things like sales support and marketing. It’s a good bet that once having established a niche, the company will look to move up the food chain.

In fact, with the introduction of Windows HPC Server 2008, Microsoft says it’s entered the supercomputing field. This would have some obvious advantages for oil and gas companies as it will allow users to 1) scale from workstations to clusters as their needs grow; 2) integrate with a Microsoft infrastructure that also includes things like Office Sharepoint Server 2007, a portal application key to many company’s collaboration efforts; and 3) streamline IT support and maintenance to a single computing platform.

Russ Sagert, Petrel portfolio manager for SIS, recently said, “It’s becoming very difficult to rationalize maintaining a PC environment for business computing and UNIX/Linux for technical computing.”

Finally, at Supercomputing 2008, it was announced that Microsoft has debuted in the top 10 of Top500’s list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers with a machine installed at Shanghai Supercomputer and Dawning Information Industry Co, Ltd., which achieved that ranking based on a parallel computing speed of 180.6 teraflops and 77.5% efficiency.