HPC rides back of resources boom

25.01.2007
Western Australia's resource boom is filtering through to the rest of the economy in numerous ways, but one IT services company is cashing in on high-performance computing solutions.

Perth-based IT company ISA Technologies has launched a hosted IT services offering for the oil and gas industries which can leverage a 64-way IBM pSeries machine and two Intel-based clusters of 56 and 120 nodes, respectively.

Managing director of ISA Technologies Sil La Puma said the rapid development of the oil and gas industry in Western Australia requires increasing use of HPC technology infrastructure to support oil and gas exploration.

"ISA Technologies' HPC facilities feature almost 500 processors and ISA is looking to expand these facilities in 2007 through greater industry access to supercomputing on demand services," La Puma said.

The first customer to sign up for the HPC offering, which runs AIX and Linux, is the West Australian Department of Industry and Resources with a six-month deal. The department did not disclose the value of the deal, but confirmed it was in the "thousands of dollars" range.

ISA Technologies is hosting the service, which is being provided by oil and gas IT specialist Schlumberger.