In March 2013, Total officially launched its new High-Performance Computing (HPC) facility at its Scientific and Technical Centre in Pau, France. With a 2.4 Petaflops capacity, PANGEA as it is called is among the most powerful computers owned by IOCs worldwide. Today's Total acreage spans a broad range of depositional settings such as Rift Systems, Pre-Salt Carbonates, Abrupt Margins, Large Deltas and Foothills, where prospects and reservoirs are increasingly complex to image and to characterize. Meanwhile, shrinking exploration periods require accelerating cycle-times. Only days after starting PANGEA, CPU time for a WATS Reverse-Time-Migration (RTM) in a deep offshore field in-Angola was reduced from one month to 54hr, and a Kirchhoff PSDM in Gabon pre-salt prospect ran in 3.5hr instead of 48hr before. Such time-saving power also allows running processes at levels thought unfeasible before: Full-Wave Form Inversion (FWI) on a field in Azerbaijan would have never been possible before. HPC also impacts our exploration operations: higher resolution velocity models help improving accuracy of well prognosis and thus reduce HSE-risks of sub-optimal well design. Another priority for Total is to shorten cycle times from Discovery to First Oil. Time-saving has to be achieved in a context where the simulated flow models tend to become geologically more complex — with an ever increasing number of grid cells - and where the physics to be simulated includes sophisticated thermal or chemical recovery processes. Next Generation Reservoir Simulator INTERSECT~R takes full advantage of PANGEA thanks to its powerful parallelized capabilities. Total, co-owner of INTERSECT~R source code, develops HPC-customized versions and workflows to quickly respond to specific engineering needs on challenging fields. In the future, HPC will further contribute to Total's efforts for better understanding and characterization of complex flow mechanisms, for EOR or unconventional reservoirs, through numerical rock and pore network modelling, or molecular simulations. As technical and economic challenges keep evolving and growing, Total's R&D programs have been launched to address more and more precise and complex geophysics and reservoir physics, the solutions of which will in turn require increasing computing power, hence new facilities upgrade. This paper summarizes Total's strategic and operational motivations for the PANGEA project, describes its characteristics, and presents operational examples illustrating current internal geosciences applications with their benefits for the exploration and development of the group's assets.
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