Microsoft enters as the low-cost vender, targeting the midmarket.

To get some idea of the state of computing in the oil & 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 & gas exploration are as demanding — especially in terms of the sheer amounts of data involved — as any found in bioinformatics, computer-aided design, or financial services.

At the same time, an equally important trend for petroleum exploration and production is that scientific and engineering applications that until recently required very powerful computers can today be 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.

The market for scientific software is evolving to reflect this bifurcation, and it is doing so along lines seen many times before, in software markets as diverse as computer-aided design, enterprise-resources planning, and process control.

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

One market observer in attendance at SEG broke down the O&G scientific software market as including Halliburton/Landmark, Schlumberger Information Solutions, and Paradigm, each of which support UNIX/Linux platforms, and to a greater or lesser extent are also adopting Microsoft; and independent software vendors (ISVs) such as SMT (Seismic Micro-Technology), Fusion, JOA, 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 has some obvious advantages for O&G 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 Schlumberger Information Solutions, 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 percent efficiency.

Incidentally, the fastest computer in the world, according to Top500 and as reported in The New York Times, is operated by the US Energy Dept. in Los Alamos, N.M., and made by IBM. It runs on Linux and is nicknamed Roadrunner, most likely because it’s capable of 1,000 teraflops, equivalent to the processing power of about one million standard desktop computers.

One final note, besides no. 10, China now has 15 of the world’s 500 fastest computers.