IBM to Open New Supercomputing Center

August 27, 2004

In response to the petroleum industry's increasing need for supercomputing power in oil exploration and production, IBM today announced its plans to open the third IBM Deep Computing Capacity on Demand (DCCOD) center in Houston, TX. The new DCCOD in Houston will join IBM's existing centers in Poughkeepsie, NY, and Montpellier, France, which currently enable customers to easily tap into massive supercomputing power to help meet critical short-term business needs, while avoiding large up-front capital outlays and long-term fixed IT costs.

Landmark Graphics, a wholly owned business unit of Halliburton, will be the anchor client for the Houston Deep Computing Capacity on Demand center, and plans to offer its seismic processing services and software to clients. Landmark can tap into the resources of the center to help its customers take advantage of the latest in computing infrastructures to achieve faster project turnaround without any up-front capital investment.

Customers of the IBM Deep Computing Capacity on Demand center in Houston will have the ability to leverage award-winning IBM supercomputing power via a pay-as-you-go delivery model. Customers who already have substantial supercomputing capacity of their own can supplement that capacity to handle peak loads, leveraging IBM Grid technologies, to combine base and peak resources. Landmark's customers will also have access to a variety of Landmark's solutions, such as their Rapid Prospect Generation Engine, which is especially valuable for imaging and other compute-intensive processes, using ProMAX(TM), SeisSpace(TM) and other technology.

"The petroleum industry is under incredible pressure now that the demand for oil is rising much faster than the supply. We are gearing up to meet expectations that world demand will grow by more than 60 percent over the next 30 years," said Peter Bernard, president, Landmark. "With IBM's Deep Computing Capacity on Demand solution, upstream E&P companies can access and pay for Landmark services and technologies as part of an open E&P computing environment. Effective cost management and increased value return from IT spend remain key objectives within the industry. We believe that offering on-demand access to optimized turnkey solutions such as the Rapid Prospect Generation tools and services can have a positive impact on our customers' bottom line."

"Deep Computing Capacity on Demand is the only offering of its kind that can give companies access to IBM world class supercomputing power to help meet a variety of spikes in needs, without the costs and management involved with owning their own supercomputer," said David Turek, vice president, IBM Deep Computing. "We realized the benefits for the petroleum industry in particular, and our center in Houston is geographically located to optimally serve these customers."

In addition to the petroleum industry, the Deep Computing Capacity on Demand business model caters to a broad spectrum of companies that have peaks and valleys in their need for supercomputing power. Commercial industries that could use supercomputing power on demand are digital animation studios, bioinformatic research companies, financial services organizations, government agencies and national research laboratories that use high performance computing on an inconsistent basis.

IBM Deep Computing Capacity on Demand can enable customers to:

Rapidly respond to their new and changing business opportunities
Compete at a scale that may not previously been possible for them
Easily tap into massive amounts of supercomputing power that could be otherwise unaffordable
Rapidly deploy supercomputing capacity in response to urgent business opportunities
Pay for supercomputing capacity on a variable cost basis, avoiding large up-front capital outlays and long term fixed IT cost commitments
Lower overall supercomputing ownership and operating costs
Take advantage of a scalable, highly secure and highly resilient on demand operating environment
Improve price/performance for compute-intensive applications and processing of massive amounts of data
Access a variety of technology to optimally serve the needs of diverse applications
The Deep Computing Capacity on Demand center in Houston is initially planned to consist of 512 IBM xSeries Xeon servers. Designed for scalability to meet increased demand, the Deep Computing Capacity on Demand center is planned to subsequently incorporate a variety of technologies consistent with market demands.

Source: IBM