Case Studies - Minerals, Utilities and Environment
Extraction of minerals – such as oil and gas, provision of public utilities such as water and environmental monitoring are all activities that require large and complex simulations with hefty data sets. The rewards of accurate simulations run into billions, while the penalty for mistakes can be catastrophic. It is not surprising, therefore, that this area is rich with success stories. These Grid and Cloud Computing case studies demonstrate the use of the technologies at the heart of the most critical processes.
Company: TraceTracker AG
Business: Food tracing solutions
Grid Solution: BEinGRID
Date: November 2009
How can food companies exploit their resources and capacities in a cost effective way? Adopting concepts developed in the field of Grid computing,
AgroGrid takes care of this crucial business need and offers a solution for sharing real-world capacities in new dynamic supply chains.
AgroGrid establishes a Grid-enabled marketplace that allows companies operating in agriculture food markets to offer and source capacities, negotiate SLAs and create dynamic supply chains. It also provides the means to monitorquality and safety of food products delivered across supply chains, based on the distributed tracking and tracing capability of the GTNet® platform
Grid computing at TraceTracker AG
Company: Vodafone Group
Business: Mobile operator
Grid Solution: BEinGRID
Date: November 2009
In the competitive telecommunications market, one of the most signifi cant ways for a telecom operator to assure revenue is by controlling revenue leakage. Fraud is a major cause of revenue loss and much of this consists of roaming fraud:when roaming services are used with no intention of paying. Roaming fraud succeeds mainly due to the delays in the cycle of information exchange between roaming partners.
The outcome of TAF-Grids is TG-FMS. Combining a roaming data exchange mechanism and a fraud management system (FMS) in the same service, it is offered to mobile network operators (MNOs) as an SaaS solution.
A switch to TG-FMS for a roaming data exchange and anti-fraud needs means joining a winning team that already enjoys:
* Real-time and accurate fraud detection of roaming traffic.
* Full NRTRDE compliance.
* Lower cost of ownership and operation through the SaaS model.
* Reduced revenue loss from roaming fraud.
* A better brand image leading to increased customer loyalty.
Grid computing at Vodafone Group
Company: CNPC BGP Inc, Zhuozhou, China
Business: Oil & Gas
Grid Technology Provider: Oracle
Date: May 2008
CNPC BGP Inc. is offers petroleum surveying services with a focus on geophysical data acquisition, processing, interpretation, equipment manufacturing, and software development. Searching for a more secure and reliable technical infrastructure for hosting their business applications portal, that would be cost effective and scalable, BGP deployed Oracle Database 10g with Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Application Server 10g running on Red Hat Linux and six Intel-based Dell servers. The resulting migration took less than a week and had an outlay of 55% that of what it would have cost to replace the original architecture.
Grid computing case study provided by Oracle
Company: CrossGrid (project) (Video case)
Business: Disaster management
This video discusses the CrossGrid scenario simulating the flooding of a Slovakian valley.. The tool is to be used a prediction technique for disaster management. Here Prof. Ladislav Hluchy discusses how Grid computing techniques can be used to carry out the huge calculations that combine data sets from satellite and meteorological data sources to help control the devastating after-effects of a flood.
Grid computing case study provided by: The Grid Stories
Company: StatoilHydro
Business: Oil
Grid Solution: Platform
Date: Dec 2007
StatoilHydro needed to give its reservoir engineers access to more computing power so that simulation applications involving vast amounts of data and complex calculations could execute faster and perform more iterations. The solution was a single, division-wide computing grid. Platform LSF MultiCluster software was used to tie four local server clusters into a single computing grid, giving each engineer user, irrespective of their location, access to the division’s entire complement of computing resources, which is fast approaching 1,000 CPUs. Meanwhile, the development team produced a seamless integration between ECLIPSE™, Platform LSF and EnginFrame.
Grid computing case study provided by Platform
Grid computing at StatOilHydro
Company: LINEG – Linksniederrheinische Entwässerungsgenossenschaft and BWA – Beijing Water Authority
Business: Water utilities
Grid Solution: BEinGRID
Date: June 2008
FEFLOW, the modeling system for subsurface low, mass and heat transport problems is already used by more than 1000 clients worldwide. It is used for several tasks, such as dewatering, water management, contaminant transport simulation and much more. When it comes to optimization tasks, a lot of different calculations must be done to get a set of results which can be used for the optimization. The present hardware and license model provides only very small possibilities. A client can use its own license and do the calculations step by step. This is very time consuming and the optimization must be done manually. The idea is to use a Grid for solving all the tasks that can be done in parallel.
The implementation of the FEFLOW Grid toolkit is based on the Globus Toolkit 4 (GT4) and can be divided into two major parts. The first part covers the Grid setup. Several SOA services were implemented which enable Grid-based optimization workflow, simulation and result evaluation.
Grid computing case study provided by IT-tude.com
Grid computing at LINEG and BWA
Company: Ventyx
Business: Solutions provider to electricity and gas utilities
Grid Solution: Sun
Ventyx, a subsidiary of Siemens Power Generation, is a leading global provider of solutions for decision support and energy operations, with clients in electric and natural gas utilities, energy trading and retailing, government, power generation and project development, and transmission. With an eye to increasing computational speed and throughput, the company migrated its grid computing infrastructure to Sun Fire x64 servers running Solaris, and deployed Sun Java Workstations for state-of-the-art software development. Ventyx also consolidated and virtualized legacy remote and back office x86 servers using Sun Fire x64 servers running VMware GSX server. This led to consolidation ratios of 18:1 and 30% heat savings on a system running computations in seconds or minutes that previously took hours.
Grid computing case study provided by Sun
Company: GMV and the European Space Agency
Grid Solution: BEinGRID
Date: June 2008
The Earth Observation (EO) domain is characterized by the acquisition of large amounts of data (terabytes) from satellites. This data is used in global, regional or local applications for various uses at different resolutions. These applications often require near-real time access to data for processing of value-added products and dissemination.
The use of distributed computing allows for a seamless allocation of required resources. The adoption of parallel service execution made a major difference in performance. Different resources compute different algorithms at the same time allowing the removal of processing bottlenecks with better task management.
Grid computing case study provided by IT-tude.com
Grid computing at GMV and the European Space Agency
Company: SURA (SCOOP)
Business: Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction
Southeastern Universities Research Association's (SURA) Southeastern Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction (SCOOP) program is looking at Grid technologies as a solution to their need of extending their Storm Surge Model’s impact.
Grid computing case study provided by SURA
Company: CGGVeritas
Business: Provider of technologies, services and equipment to the oil and gas industry
Grid Solution: BEinGRID
Date: June 2008
World events influence the oil and gas markets and, therefore, the supply and demand of natural resources. Pressures on the markets include the depletion of the North Sea fields and increasing demand from Asian countries. Improved access to unexplored - but more difficult to reach regions such as the Arctic zones - means oil and gas companies have the opportunity exploit marginal reserves. Interested petrochemical and exploration companies have to explore promising locations and take rapid decisions. Seismic data processing and reservoir simulations are essential tools in this activity. Seismic data processing delivers images and properties of the subsurface, while reservoir simulations help optimize oil resources.
The solution developed by this Grid Pilot would be of interest to many geoscientists. Thanks to Grid-based technology, geoscientists have the power to access remote computing resources on demand and create a framework for sharing data and project resources. The same technology allows colleagues at any given location through collaborative tools to work together and make use of the seismic processing software, GeoCluster, and generate reservoir simulations with Dynamo application.
Grid computing case study provided by IT-tude.com
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