OREANDA-NEWS. May 28, 2015. BG Brasil and Senai CIMATEC today unveil the fastest ever supercomputer in Latin America 1 at the Senai CIMATEC Supercomputing Center for Industrial Innovation in Salvador, Bahia. Designed by BG Group, the oil and gas company, in partnership with SENAI/Fieb, the supercomputer is capable of performing at 400 trillion operations per second (TFlops - FLoating-point Operations Per Second). The launch of the supercomputer is a key milestone for BG’s R&D program focusing on geophysics, involving a total investment of R\\$ 60 million.

Baptized as CIMATEC Yemoja, (Afro-Brazilian deity Iemanja in Iorub?), the supercomputer is part of a revolutionary initiative in seismic data processing. A world-class center of excellence in computing is also being opened as part of the R&D program.

"The complexity of the pre-salt fields drives us to seek increasingly innovative solutions. The supercomputer is part of this effort and will assist us in our daily activities in the oil and gas industry. Our goal is to champion innovation in Brazil, promoting globally competitive, technologically based local content"

Nelson Silva CEO,BG South America

The project will prioritise the study and optimization of the technology known as Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) for processing 3D and 4D seismic data on an industrial scale. The project will be conducted by the consortium International Inversion Initiative, led by BG Brasil. The Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), the University of British Columbia (Canada) and Imperial College London (England) are collaborating in the research; the latter two are world references in FWI.

Rick Moore, CTO of BG Group, added: "This project illustrates the innovative environment in Brazil which is stimulating research partnerships of global significance. The Supercomputer will give BG and leading university research groups the strategic infrastructure to resolve major industry challenges in reservoir imaging and data processing. This was made possible through the R&D levy in alignment with ANP, federal and state funding."

CIMATEC Yemoja uses Intel Xeon and Xeon Phi™ processors and the SGI® ICE X™ system. According to the Regional Director of SENAI Bahia, Leone Peter Andrade, the use of computer modeling software demands specialist expertise and long-term development. He added, "The Supercomputing Center, with its large-scale capacity, will offer solutions to companies geared to their technological needs."

Technical specifications - CIMATEC Yemoja

  • Number 1 ranked high performance computer in Latin America and 124th in the world ranking of the TOP 500 supercomputers
  • 405 trillion mathematical operations per second
  • 17.200 CPU cores for computing (Intel Xeon processors 10 cores E5-2690V2)
  • Disk storage >2 petabytes with IO performance of 18 gigabytes per second
  • Fiber based FDR InfiniBand interconnection in a 6D hypercube configuration 

1 According to the TOP 500 ranking, an organization listing the most powerful computers in the world.