High performance visual computing systems used by the E&P industry tend to be fairly expensive.  Offering them on the Linux operating system makes them more financially accessible to users.  SGI has rolled out Silicon Graphics PrismTM, which combines Intel® Itanium® 2 and the Linux® operating environment in their most advanced computer graphics platform.

Because of limited memory and processing capability, typical commodity graphics systems today break oil exploration data into smaller chunks for graphics processing, remarked the vendor. 

For example, "imagine sorting through a stack of 1,000 postcard-sized images and then pasting them together to form a mosaic of a whole," said Shawn Underwood, marketing director, visual systems group, SGI.  "That's essentially what is done with distributed processing across an array of commodity boxes.  It's slow and imperfect.  With Silicon Graphics Prism you see the whole picture instantly."

According to the vendor, users are able to see their visual data in much greater detail.  They're able to better grasp complex relationships within their data by seeing terabyte-sized datasets as a single, contiguous unit.

What's more is that the most sophisticated graphics systems are now available for about $30,000, a quarter of their original cost because they're now available on Linux, said Ginny Babbitt, public relations, product and technology, SGI.

http://www.sgi.com