The Industry's Most Powerful Computer Boosted

Total's supercomputer Pangea recently boosted its computing power from 2.3 to 6.7 petaflops (quadrillion (thousand trillion) floating point operations (flops) per second), the equivalent of more than 80,000 laptops combined. 

Its storage capacity has also been increased, to 26 petabytes (million gigabytes of data) — the equivalent of six million DVDs. 

With this upgrade, Pangea is the No. 1 Computer in the industry and among the top 10 most powerful computers, public or private, worldwide in the TOP500 ranking. 
 
“We tripled Pangea’s computing power in just two years,” said Arnaud Breuillac, President Total Exploration & Production. “In the era of big data, state-of-the-art data-intensive computing is a competitive advantage. This power will help us to improve our performance and to reduce our costs.”
 
Pangea is a decision-support tool used for exploration and field management. The reasons for investing in the latest IT technologies in the market are to:
 
•    Improve the accuracy of subsurface imaging.
•    Optimize the development and production of Total’s fields.
•    Save time by shortening the duration of studies.
 
The capacity boost will support the use of next-generation algorithms developed by Total's research and development team to image increasingly complex regions and produce numerical simulations of fields, incorporating 4D seismic data. 4D seismic consists of repeating three-dimensional (3D) seismic surveys over time across the same area.
 
Pangea requires a power supply of 4.5 MW. Total’s buildings in Pau, France, are heated by reusing some of the heat released by the supercomputer. 

Pangea was designed by Silicon Graphics International (SGI).