Integrated Cloud Computing Environment for Upstream Geoscience Workflows

Extensive computing resources are required to leverage todays advanced geoscience workflows that are used to explore and characterize giant petroleum resources. In these cases, high-performance workstations are often unable to adequately handle the scale of computing required. The workflows typically utilize complex and massive data sets, which require advanced computing resources to store, process, manage, and visualize various forms of the data throughout the various lifecycles. This work describes a large-scale geoscience end-to-end interpretation platform customized to run on a cluster-based remote visualization environment. A team of computing infrastructure and geoscience workflow experts was established to collaborate on the deployment, which was broken down into separate phases. Initially, an evaluation and analysis phase was conducted to analyze computing requirements and assess potential solutions. A testing environment was then designed, implemented and benchmarked. The third phase used the test environment to determine the scale of infrastructure required for the production environment. Finally, the full-scale customized production environment was deployed for end users. During testing phase, aspects such as connectivity, stability, interactivity, functionality, and performance were investigated using the largest available geoscience datasets. Multiple computing configurations were benchmarked until optimal performance was achieved, under applicable corporate information security guidelines. It was observed that the customized production environment was able to execute workflows that were unable to run on local user workstations. For example, while conducting connectivity, stability and interactivity benchmarking, the test environment was operated for extended periods to ensure stability for workflows that require multiple days to run. To estimate the scale of the required production environment, varying categories of users’ portfolio were determined based on data type, scale and workflow. Continuous monitoring of system resources and utilization enabled continuous improvements to the final solution. The utilization of a fit-for-purpose, customized remote visualization solution may reduce or ultimately eliminate the need to deploy high-end workstations to all end users. Rather, a shared, scalable and reliable cluster-based solution can serve a much larger user community in a highly performant manner.