Guess the new entrants in the biannual list of the world’s 500 fastest computers? Saudi Aramco! It had two new entries and both are Dell clusters, running Intel processors and are very fast.
The national oil company of Saudi Arabia pumps about 10 million barrels of oil a day, about four times as much as Exxon Mobil Corp.
The oil industry uses Concorde-jet speed computing to aid it understanding underground reservoirs and to look for new sources of oil and gas. Aramco used another computer cluster to build a “full field model” of the Safaniya oilfield in 2008.
Whay is Aramco taking a sophisticated approach to understanding its remaining oil resources? A sign of worry about the future?
The world’s fifth-fastest supercomputer – Tianhe-1 in Tianjin, China – will be used in part for “petroleum exploration.” Not only is the oil adding to the warming, but also the supercomputers.
Ironically, the computers used by people studying climate change are doing their bit to heat up the atmosphere! On the list, supercomputers No. 89 and No. 90 belong to the United Kingdom Meteorological Office. They use IBM-powered clusters to study and predict climate change patterns. The Met’s supercomputer generates about 12,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year, making it one of the worst greenhouse gas emitters in the nation.
A vicious circle where the very means of enquiry is adding to the problem! What do you say? Should we do away with such energy-guzzling computers, just like California has planned to do away with guzzler TVs?
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