How Sun can help Oil & Gas companies

There can be no doubt that today man is consuming more energy per head than ever before in history. Most of our hydrocarbon use has occurred over the last 100 years and at the current rate of oil consumption, it is believed by most industry experts, we would have reached maximum production of oil (commonly known as peak oil) and have used most available oil in less than 100 years.

Given the run away energy consumption that we currently enjoy, what can Sun Microsystems do to help companies, and in particular, Oil and Gas companies, slow this consumption and practice energy conservation? Additionally, how can Sun help Oil and Gas companies find more resources and improve EOR (Enhanced Oil Recovery) for existing resource reservoirs.

Sun Microsystems helps in three ways:

• By providing leading edge technical IT solutions to assist Oil and Gas companies locate new hydrocarbon deposits and improved exploitation of existing hydrocarbon reserves.
• Provide IT solutions that are energy efficient and maintenance efficient to help reduce energy spent in installing, running, upgrading and maintaining IT infrastructure.
• Reducing Sun's own carbon footprint and encouraging suppliers, customers and employees to do the same, whilst fostering research and the use of alternative energy.

Exploration and Production Technical Solutions

Complementing Sun's expert IT business solutions, Sun has many technical IT solutions that are used to help O&G companies find new fields and better exploit existing reservoirs. Prime examples of this technology are Sun's faster and more efficient HPC and visualisation solutions for such processes as seismic processing and reservoir simulation.

Remote and Mobile Data-centres

Anything we can determine about hydrocarbon reservoirs, whether finding them or exploring them, is “indirect” knowledge. A geophysicist cannot dig down into geological layers to discover hydrocarbon traps, nor can they dive into the existing reservoirs to optimize recovery. All we have, apart from spot drilling data, is data collected from the Earth’s surface via remote sensing of some kind. This data must be computer-processed to

generate a geophysical model of the underlying subsurface. The trend of collecting more and more of this data in real time (4D) with finer and finer resolution will continue in the future and become too large to be sent to centralised processing centres. Hence this data will have to be pre-processed, quasi real-time, in the field. IT will have to provide this computing power in the form of robust, mobile data-centres on-shore or offshore.

Sun has created a unique technology that is a robust data-centre in a container. Originally dubbed the Black Box, but now known as the Sun Modular Data Centre (MDC) , it has several standard computer racks in which data-centre equipment, such as HPC systems or data storage systems, can be mounted. Unique to the MDC, it only requires power, chilled water and a network for the processing power and storage etc in the MDC to become immediately operational. All the equipment in the MDC is sprung loaded and insulated to avoid damage due to movement shocks and the local ambient conditions.

High Performance Computing

Researchers are working today on very sophisticated algorithms which will allow much more precise predicted views of the underlying geological structure. Future IT will be challenged to build the large compute clusters that will be needed to drive these new simulation engines to provide true real time processing (4D). Finally, there is the huge challenge faced by IT and the Oil Industry, the panacea of the “Digital Oil Field”. The process by which all the reservoir simulation technology, recovery technology, drilling technology etc is all digitally connected to the supply chain technology. Future systems should be able to drive the production of wells, as a function of demand on the worldwide market.

Sun has unique experience in successfully building some of the worlds largest compute clusters, for example 11,000 cores for TiTech in Japan, 25,000 cores for KISTI Institute in Korea, and 52,000 cores for TACC in USA. Unique about these clusters is that they are not divided into smaller units of departmental clusters (departmentalised), but run as a complete large cluster, unlike most systems of this size. In the Infiniband industry where the previously largest interconnect switch was 288 ports, Sun uniquely provides a 3,456 port switch which allows such large systems (above) to be assembled and run as full large scale clusters.

It is with these and many other unique Sun technologies, such as Solaris, Lustre, etc where Sun Microsystems can help now and in the future search for and recovery of hydrocarbon resources.

Energy Efficient Technologies

One of the key areas Sun is helping companies reduce their energy consumption is by creating efficient, energy saving IT solutions and technology. Three good examples of Sun's energy saving technologies are:

• Sun's thin client solution, the Sunray;
• Sun's Chip Multi-threading Technology, currently an eight core processor aptly termed “Cool Threads”; and
• The development of high speed, fast access tape technology.

Sunray thin client technology

The “ Sunray ” is an ultra-thin client, barely bigger than a postcard and as thick as a matchbox, has no disk, no processor and no memory and draws less than 4 watts of power. All the operating systems and applications are installed on redundant Sunray servers installed in the data-centres and are managed centrally.

A Sunray supports single and dual monitors and delivers to the end-user Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Solaris applications simultaneously. This has a host of advantages not the least of which is ease of management for the IT department, business flexibility, and ease of training. Sunray technology allows easy migration to different applications, upgrade to new versions or even new applications without having to worry about the different types and architectures of end-user client systems that may be out in the field.

With the deployment of Sunray clients there are huge savings in terms of cost, maintenance and energy consumption. Apart from other great advantages such as data security (against theft, loss and corruption), a backup strategy becomes so much easier to implement and upgrades and application licensing / distribution also become simpler. Other solutions such as data sharing, single sign on and identity management all become possible and simple to implement under this architecture.

Chip Multi-threading Technology (CMT)

There is a lot in the press currently about the fantastic quad core processors that are available today. Which company do you know has a main stream processor with eight (8) cores today and has been selling it into main stream computing since 2005? If you are thinking Sun Microsystems you would be right.

Rather than play the clock-rate game, Sun decided to explore multiple core technology and multi-threading in hardware to utilise the wasted clock cycles when a single threaded processor waits for I/O to complete. Since their introduction, Sun systems using CMT processors, termed Sun CoolThreads systems have set more than 50 performance records yet these CMT processor run at a much lower clock rate than your average conventional processor.

You can further explore this technology and the 1-way, 2-way and 4-way systems and blades utilising the CMT processors at http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/overview/index.jsp

High Speed Tape Technology

One of Sun's seven recommended steps to an energy efficient data-centre is to move old data to tape. Tape provides approximately 20-200 times more terabytes of storage per kilowatt than rotating storage. Sun provides leading solutions in tape drive, VTL & robotic library options , for example, the unique Sun StorageTek T10000 tape drive sets the new performance standard for streaming data with 500 GB capacity, 120 MB/sec throughput performance and media reusability, bringing unsurpassed value and huge energy savings to IT departments. Add in crypto-ready technology to support compliance initiatives and the T10000 stands apart in a class all by itself.

Reducing Sun's Carbon Footprint and Alternative Energy

At Sun, the first step in being eco responsible is "greening" our business, or minimizing the environmental impact of our own operations. From carbon emissions to energy usage and the efficiency of our data-centres, we are determined to integrate eco principles into every aspect of our operations and deliver value for all of our stakeholders, including the environment.

Sun is firm in its commitment to a 20 percent reduction of our U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over 2002 levels by 2012, which was made as part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Climate Leaders program. We have taken a giant leap in establishing such an aggressive GHG reduction goal. Achieving our goal will take a concerted effort as well as a coordinated strategy, and will involve the following steps:

• Continue to fine-tune our 2002 baseline GHG emissions data (estimated at 263,465 metric tons), on which our 20 percent reduction goal is based
• Establish tracking systems to capture and measure our GHG emissions, and report our findings publicly and against our baseline data
• Develop a global baseline and set reduction targets for all operations worldwide by the end of calendar year 2007
• Continue to reduce energy usage in our data-centres, converting them into eco responsible facilities
• Develop an alternative energy strategy

Fostering research and use of alternative energy

While reducing energy consumption will have the greatest impact on shrinking Sun's carbon footprint, another viable approach is to use renewable energy. Sun is working to develop an alternative energy strategy that will allow us to fulfil more of our energy needs off the grid by using solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources.

In fact, in the United Kingdom, Sun has been purchasing renewably generated energy for a number of years. We believe that by investing now in renewable energy, Sun can help create and sustain a marketplace for alternative sources, and that could ultimately lead to lower energy costs for both consumers and businesses.

Eco Innovation Solution Briefs

The Sun Eco Innovation solutions deliver a clear, actionable 3-step approach to improving IT's efficiency while reducing its environmental effects. It showcases our advanced eco products. It takes advantage of the ingenuity of our eco communities and eco partners. It fully leverages our eco expertise through documented best practices, step-by-step methodologies, state-of-the-art tools, valuable services programs, and more. And it's backed by hard data from industry-standard benchmarks and real successes from customers worldwide and from our own datacenters. It's an approach that just makes sense economically and ecologically. Learn more at http://www.sun.com/solutions/eco_innovation/index.jsp

Browse the solution briefs below to understand Sun's approach and best practices for building an energy efficient data-centre.

• Aligning Business Organizations: Sun's approach for building energy efficient data-centres
• Creating an Energy Efficient Data-centre: Consolidate with Sun technology
• Accurately Measuring Power Efficiency in the Data-centre: Timely and Accurate Measurements with Sun Eco Services
• Powering Sun's Energy Efficient Data-centres: Modular power distribution for today and tomorrow
• Connecting Sun's Energy Efficient Data-centres: Innovative best practices for cabling
• Cooling Sun's Energy Efficient Data-centres: Efficient, scalable cooling at the rack and room level