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PARIS, March 22 (Reuters) - French oil major Total on Friday launched a new supercomputer that will help it findoil 15 times faster than before and rank it among the world'stop 10 institutions in terms of computing power.
The machine, called Pangea, will allow the Paris-based groupto help gauge more precisely the potential of exploration wellsand the size of its oil reserves.
Pangea helped analyse seismic data from Total's Kaomboproject in Angola in just nine days, instead of the four and ahalf months it would have taken with its previous computer,Philippe Malzac, IT director at Total's Exploration division,told Reuters.
Total trumps British rival BP with the 2.3-petaflopsupercomputer. BP said last December it was building a 2petaflop supercomputing facility in Houston, Texas.
"Our competitors are also working on these kind ofalgorithms, but we think this is giving us a head start," Malzacsaid.
Malzac declined to disclose the purchasing cost of the newsystem, but said it would spend 60 million euros ($77.55million) to run it over the next four years.
The computer is 15 times more powerful than its previousRostand computer, which it has used since 2008, with computingcapacity equivalent to that of 27,000 office computers.
Oil prices have stood above $100 a barrel -- a comfortablelevel for investment -- for most of the last two years, pushingoil and gas companies to spend ever more on exploration anddrilling in high-risk but lucrative areas, mostly under theseabed.
Total said earlier this year it would raise its explorationbudget to $2.8 billion this year, a 12 percent increase from theprevious year.
The supercomputer, built by California-based SiliconGraphics International (SGI), will be stored at Total'sresearch centre in the southwestern French city of Pau.
The global market for high-performance computers is growingat 7 percent a year, with the top-end of the market rising by upto 28 percent annually, said Bill Mannel, Vice-President ofProduct Marketing at SGI.
Large multinational firms are now using systems as powerfulas some military equipment, Mannel said.
"At the same time we're installing Total, we're actuallyinstalling a very large system for the U.S. Defense department,with similar kind of capability, at the U.S. air force site inOhio," he added.
Supercomputers are ranked twice a year, in June andNovember, by the TOP500 table (www.top500.org).
With Pangea, Total ranks ninth on that list, putting it tworanks above the most powerful supercomputer in France, which isused by top public nuclear research centre CEA and built byFrench company Bull.
The world's most powerful supercomputer in last November'sranking was Titan, which is located in Tennessee and was fundedby the U.S. Department of Energy. Titan is used in the fields ofastrophysics and climate change simulations, among others.
