SGI Enables Effort to Accelerate Oil and Gas Reservoir Modeling and Simulation As Exploration Produces Increasingly Larger Data, SGI Altix 3000 Helps Marathon Oil Company Pinpoint Discoveries Up to Four Times Faster MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Dec. 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Throughout the oil and gas industry, modeling and simulation data sets are growing in size exponentially, making it increasingly difficult to conduct large-scale computational tasks. At Houston-based Marathon Oil Company, the company's Reservoir Description and Management group recently installed an SGI(R) Altix(TM) 3000 system driven by 12 Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processors for the intensive modeling tasks needed to describe the subsurface and predict fluid flow at Marathon fields around the world. The unique SGI(R) NUMAlfex(TM) shared-memory architecture enables Altix 3000 servers and superclusters to distribute calculations over an array of nodes. "With traditional distributed computing architecture, complex tasks based on large data sets need to be broken up into subsets. That becomes unwieldy and eventually impossible as those sets become increasingly dense," explains Mark Petersen, manager, Reservoir Description and Management, Marathon Oil. "With the NUMAflex shared memory architecture of the Altix 3000 family, all processors can work on the same task in resident memory simultaneously, even if the model is 30 gigabytes or more," said Bill Bartling, senior director, Market Strategy at SGI. "That dramatically speeds up -- currently by a factor of four -- what would otherwise be enormously difficult and time- consuming jobs." Petersen's department is involved with the first two of three steps in the well management process, all related to estimating oil and gas reserves in the subsurface and predicting how quickly the company can produce those reserves: -- the geocellular model, a static model describing the rocks and fluid properties of the field, -- reservoir simulation, a fluid dynamic model characterizing how fluids flow through and from those rocks, and -- the economic model, enabling the company to efficiently manage the monetary resources required to produce the hydrocarbons. "The first two steps allow Marathon to look at a number of possible production scenarios -- how many platforms do you build, when do you build them, how much do you spend, etc. -- and selecting the best one to produce the optimum rates of oil," explains Peterson. The third step models the cash flow from the project based on each of the scenarios under consideration. "Historically, throughout the industry, otherwise high-resolution reservoir models were decimated in order for yesterday's lower-performance computers to handle them," added Bartling. "Today, Altix systems allow companies to retain high-resolution models, computing them in the same time or less than was the case with yesterday's models. That equates to cost savings, better planning, more effective and efficient oil production, predicable revenues and increased shareholder value." "It's gratifying to know that SGI's family of products fulfills not only the industry's visualization and storage needs but also the increasingly demanding HPC needs of such leading international oil and gas companies as Marathon," added Bartling. "We look forward to working with Marathon to help meet its computing challenges for many years to come." Scalable SGI Altix 3000 systems are available today in server configurations of 4 to 64 processors, and supercluster configurations of 4 to 512 processors. For customers demanding even larger Altix superclusters, SGI plans to support configurations of 1,024 processors in May 2004 and larger over time. With global shared memory across cluster nodes, Altix 3000 superclusters will scale to up to thousands of processors. Such supercluster capabilities leverage the built-in SGI(R) NUMAlink(TM) interconnect fabric, delivering data across nodes up to 200 times faster than conventional clustering interconnects. For the leading oil and gas customers this means that larger, more complex reservoir models than ever before can be run directly out of one main memory. This, in turn, will enable faster and better solutions for maximizing oil field yields. For details about SGI's involvement with the international oil and gas industry, visit http://www.sgi.com/industries/energy, and for perspective on SGI Altix 3000 systems, visit http://www.sgi.com/servers/altix. This release contains forward-looking statements regarding SGI technologies and third-party technologies that are subject to risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in such statements. The viewer is cautioned not to rely unduly on these forward-looking statements, which are not a guarantee of future or current performance. Such risks and uncertainties include long-term program commitments, the performance of third parties, the sustained performance of current and future products, financing risks, the impact of competitive markets, the ability to integrate and support a complex technology solution involving multiple providers and users, the acceptance of applicable technologies by markets and customers, and other risks detailed from time to time in the company's most recent SEC reports, including its reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. SILICON GRAPHICS | The Source of Innovation and Discovery(TM) SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc., is the world's leader in high-performance computing, visualization and storage. SGI's vision is to provide technology that enables the most significant scientific and creative breakthroughs of the 21st century. Whether it's sharing images to aid in brain surgery, finding oil more efficiently, studying global climate or enabling the transition from analog to digital broadcasting, SGI is dedicated to addressing the next class of challenges for scientific, engineering and creative users. SGI was named on FORTUNE magazine's 2003 list of "Top 100 Companies to Work For." With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and can be found on the Web at http://www.sgi.com/. NOTE: Silicon Graphics, SGI and the SGI logo are registered trademarks and Altix, NUMAflex, NUMAlink and The Source of Innovation and Discovery are trademarks of Silicon Graphics, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries worldwide. Intel and Itanium are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners. (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20010510/SFTH025LOGO ) Media Contact Lisa Pistacchio 650-933-5683 SGI PR Hotline 650.933.7777 SGI PR Facsimile 650.933.0283 http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20010510/SFTH025LOGO http://photoarchive.ap.org/ DATASOURCE: SGI CONTACT: Lisa Pistacchio of SGI, +1-650-933-5683, or ; or SGI PR Hotline, +1-650-933-7777; or SGI PR Facsimile, +1-650-933-0283 Web site: http://www.sgi.com/

Copyright