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Visual area networking

Tools for exploration and enterprise computing

SGI, Bakersfield, California, U.S.

Corresponding author: wbartling@sgi.com

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

Two industry trends are converging in a way that creates great opportunities for creative minds—particularly for creative managers.

On one side, we have geographically distributed asset teams that have long felt the business need to view and manipulate data collaboratively for real-time decision-making. Although this has been a focus of oil companies for well over a decade, most needed components are only now available. These include powerful graphical computers, remote displays with platform-independent access to those computers, and software uniquely designed to connect the two—that is, software designed to connect people, process, and data in distributed decision systems.

On the other side, we have oil company and oil services mergers of the recent past that have resulted in national and multinational oil corporations of mega-proportions. Over the next decade, the challenges of oil and oil service companies will transition away from improving exploration success toward production efficiency and optimization—and mega-merged companies will struggle to survive if they cannot optimize their assets. So, which tools will inevitably rise to the surface to accomplish that task? Those same components: powerful graphics computers, clients accessing those computers, and software connecting them together.

Who would have thought we'd see the day when the same graphical computing tools would meet such diverse oil and gas company needs? Not only do they address the needs of mission-critical exploration and production teams, but increasingly they also address the needs of enterprise computing managers concerned about maximizing efficiency and optimization. It will only be a matter of time before managers make the connection and realize what a valuable asset their already existing visualization systems are because it will be quick and easy to turn such systems into decision-making hubs across the enterprise and throughout the oil production process as well.

	Enterprise computing needs of mega-merged companies

 
Let's take a closer look at each of . . . [Full Text of this Article]