Petroleum Industry Teams With IBM Grid Technology

IBM has announced plans to establish its third IBM Deep Computing Capacity on Demand (DCCOD) center in Houston, Texas. The new DCCOD is initially planned to comprise 512 IBM xSeries Xeon servers, and will join IBM's existing centers in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and Montpellier, France.

Landmark Graphics, a wholly owned business unit of Halliburton, will be the anchor client for the center, citing the petroleum industry's increasing need for supercomputing power in oil exploration and production, as reasons for the alignment.

"With IBM's Deep Computing Capacity on Demand solution, upstream E&P [exploration and production] companies can access and pay for Landmark services and technologies as part of an open E&P computing environment," said Peter Bernard, president of Landmark in a statement. "Effective cost management and increased value return from IT spend remain key objectives within the industry."

Customers of IBM's supercomputing center in Houston can leverage its power through a pay-as-you-go delivery model. Those already with substantial supercomputing capacity of their own can supplement that capacity to handle peak loads, leveraging IBM Grid technologies, to combine base and peak resources.