Comment there are more of these beasts hiding in the wild (Score 5, Interesting) 135
There are actually quite a few of these big machines. Most of them in Houston, but some in Europe. Every major Oil Company and Every large Seismic company has one. They are all huge, and I have never seen on of them shut down to run benchmarks, and most folks don't externally advertise their existence. The cost too much and they have too much backlog and will never appear on a bullshit benchmark web page reserved for underutilized supercomputers.
To the person asking if these are overkill? No, The folks referencing the RTM, FWI etc have hit the equations on the head. One processing job may take 6 + months to run a single migration using 20,000 + cpus. They run all kinds of cpus' gpu's and change out masses of them every time there is a step change in a chip for efficiency. If they had chips 100 times more powerful, they have equations waiting for them.
with regards to the person or people talking about carbon ending it all etc..
These machines enable the reservoir engineers to target more reservoirs and then deplete these reservoirs more efficiently leaving less hydrocarbon behind (theoretically reducing the number of dry wells) We will never run out of oil, we will however run out of the technology to efficiently extract it from the ground. ( or it will become cost prohibitive)
Carbon use however is another kettle of fish. Making hydrocarbon more expensive will only push coal back front. (look at china, germany etc) Until use is addressed, alternative will be what they could be. Doing things like shooting ourselves in the foot with ethanol is a good way not to proceed though
