Last week, Cray Cray announced that it had entered into a contract for one of its XC40 supercomputer systems to Petroleum Geo-Services, a company that provides data analysis and exploration services for energy companies to find the locations of oil and gas reserves.

PGS will be using the new system as part of their production process, using the system to analyze data that the company gathers as its explores for oil and gas resources. That makes it unique in that it wont be used, as most supercomputers are, for research and development purposes.

This is exciting for us, Crays Barry Bolding told me. This isnt for a customers R&D organization doing futures development. Its actually a production system doing their direct product. Its very similar to weather prediction where were right in the middle of things at sites around the world.

A Cray XC40 supercomputer. (Credit: Cray)

Equally interesting about this system is that when its deployed, it will be one of the fastest in the world, processing data at about 5 petaflops. After the initial press release last week, IDC released a quick research note about the announced sale.

This, to IDCs knowledge, is the largest supercomputer sold into the O&G sector and will be one of the biggest in any commercial market, the report stated. The system would have ranked in the top dozen on the November 2014 list of the worlds Top500 supercomputers.

Building one of the dozen fastest supercomputers isnt new for Cray theyve got three in the current top 12 now. But what is unique is that most of those 12 belong to government research labs or universities, not private companies. This may be starting to change, however. For example, IDC notes that overall supercomputing spending in the oil and gas sector alone is expected to reach $2 billion in the period from 2013-2018.

Cray has taken note of the commercial opportunities. Internally were investing in our infrastructure, Bolding told me. Weve been building up our sales teams and expertise in a number of segments. Weve been averaging 10% in commercial sales over the past few years but thats grown from zero.

Bolding went on to say that

We believe we can grow here because of the convergence of big data and big computing. That impacts not just government data centers, but commercial workflows, whether its energy exploration or manufacturing of jet aircraft or automated cars or social media. This convergence over the next few years is going to increase the computing needs of the commercial sectors.

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Commercial Supercomputing Heats Up As Cray Sells One Of The World's Fastest Systems