Statoil, Landmark and SGI to link intercontinental gas and oil facilities

Stavanger, 18 November 98 Norwegian oil and gas supplier Statoil linked up its Silicon Graphics RealityCenter facility in Stavanger with a similar facility at Landmark Graphics Corporation's headquarters in Houston. The technology enables geoscientists at each location to work simultaneously on the same 3D seismic data sets, with changes replicated at both sites in real time.

The new techniques used in this project will enable oil and gas companies to achieve cost savings by cutting the time taken to interpret subsurface data and reservoir characteristics. Powered by Silicon Graphics Onyx2 workstations for visual supercomputing, the RealityCenter facilities allow the virtual team of Statoil/Landmark geoscientists and engineers to remotely interact with subsurface data in 3D environments.

The project used an exploration and production integrated information application developed by Landmark Graphics. Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor was another key contributor to the project and provided the network infrastructure. Trimension Systems provided the display screen technology for Landmark's facility, while TAN provided the display for Statoil's facility. Similar RealityCenter collaboration projects have been carried out in academic and manufacturing fields, but this is the first time that a petroleum company has taken commercial advantage of the technology to communicate on a global scale.

Statoil's Stavanger RealityCenter is powered by an Onyx2 workstation with 16 CPUs, 8GB of memory and four InfiniteReality graphics subsystems. The system is utilized onmultiple modes. Groups of geoscientists and engineers can use the system's total graphics power to perform seismic analysis. The Onyx2 system can also be used in a multi-seat mode, enabling individual users to work concurrently on subsurface interpretation. Additionally, the system can be used to compute reservoir simulation tasks.

Sandra Wermer