Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) has deployed a Linux-based High Performance Cluster from Sun Microsystems to run its reservoir simulation software.

The Linux-based High Performance Cluster will help boost its processing power, and enable the company to take critical business decisions faster than ever before.

KOC, established in 1934 as a joint venture between British Petroleum Company (BP) and Gulf Oil Corporation (GOC), and then nationalised by Kuwait government in 1975, is one of the largest oil companies in the world.

As the backbone of Kuwait’s economy, KOC is responsible for exploration, drilling, production, and development of the oil and gas fields in the State of Kuwait.

The company is aiming to increase its export production capacity from 2.5 million bopd to 4.0 million bopd by 2020.
Badria Abdul Rahman, KOC Manager (Field Development, South & East Kuwait) said: “Before deploying the Sun Cluster in KOC, we had a system that could take several days and sometimes even weeks to run the simulation applications on which we base our business decisions."

"We needed a solution that would increase our processing power to ‘crunch’ the data generated by the reservoir simulation software more rapidly, giving us greater efficiency and the ability to take faster business decisions,” she added.

Badria added: “The Sun cluster has exceeded our expectations and has enabled the entire KOC team to access vital up-to-date information on all aspects of the oil reserves; we are now able to run simulations faster than ever before which has resulted in the development of long term strategies and preparations for the future new wells to meet the production target."

Mariam Al Ajmi, team leader information systems, added that the deployment of Sun cluster aligns with KOC IT Group strategy for setting up state-of-the art technologies with maximum ROI.

The system is capable of running a number of simulation jobs simultaneously and has proven to deliver significant performance enhancement as simulation of massive reservoir models (in the order of 10 million cells) can be carried out at a reasonable time and at an affordable computing cost.

Marc Heger, district manager - Gulf Region, Sun Microsystems, said: “By opting for a Sun clusters with standard, off-the-shelf processors and open standards like Linux, KOC were soon seeing the results of increased availability of data due to better computing power and faster application execution; the ability to scale to accommodate growth; increased utilisation of computing resources; and a reduced risk and time to deployment.”

The Sun deployment at KOC was managed by Sun’s Executive level partner Diyar United Company (DUC). - TradeArabia News Service