The Three Silver Bullets Of HPC For Oil and Gas

High Performance Computing (HPC), or supercomputing, is a powerful tool for research and production use. However, HPC inhabits a complex and rapidly evolving technology landscape. This presents challenges for those seeking to use HPC, in terms of picking the right technologies, and exploiting them effectively. Active research programs and technology companies around the world continue to propose solutions for various aspects of the HPC difficulties.

Many of these proposed solutions are hyped as ‘silver bullets’, hoping to solve major challenges with how we use HPC or deliver disruptive improvements. This talk explores three of these ‘silver bullets’ to examine whether their will live up to their hype and what problems they will solve. The three silver bullets are: GPUs, cloud computing, new programming languages and domain specific languages.

Merely identifying the silver bullets is not enough – this talk will explore how each silver bullet affects oil and gas use cases of HPC. How can oil and gas users of HPC take advantage of these silver bullets? How will they drive the skills needs and software methods used by developers?