CENTER FOR COMPUTATION & TECHNOLOGY

Grid Today By Grid Today Staff SURA, AT&T Enable Southern Leg Of Nationwide Research Network Thanks in large part to a U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) grant, nearly $4 million has been committed to a Louisiana university program to increase oil and gas discovery and productivity in the Gulf of Mexico via a powerful computing and monitoring system. The three-year, $1.2 million DOE grant, which could be extended to six years, was awarded to three Louisiana universities through the DOE Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). The Board of Regents is matching the award with $1.2 million and participating universities have pledged over $1.5 million, bringing the total to over $3.9 million. “Increasing our nation’s domestic petroleum supply and decreasing its dependence on petroleum imports relies heavily on the efficient production of energy resources in the Gulf of Mexico. It is also imperative for Louisiana’s economy, which is more dependent on energy than any state except Alaska, to more progressively employ emerging technologies to enhance energy productivity and management,” said Commissioner of Higher Education Joseph Savoie in announcing the grant. Researchers at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (ULL), the lead institution; Louisiana State University and A&M College (LSU) and Southern University and A&M College (SU) will develop a powerful ubiquitous computing and monitoring system (UCoMS) by integrating the scattered computing and centralized communications systems currently in use. Establishing Louisiana as a national center for the development of grid computing technology with applications in oil and gas exploration and production is the prime objective. “This multi-disciplinary project has the potential to establish new industry procedures that promise truly revolutionary gains,” said Michael Khonsari, Louisiana EPSCoR project director and the Regents’ associate commissioner for sponsored programs research and development. “The massive computation power of the UCoMS grid will ensure maximum utilization of oil and gas fields by substantially improving oil and gas well productivity and characterizing reservoirs.” According to Nian-Feng Tzeng, ULL professor of computer engineering and the project's principal investigator, the research will focus on: 1) a wireless networked system, 2) grid computing with massive computation power and storage for the discovery and management of energy resources, and 3) energy discovery and management applications that take advantage of the UCoMS. Additional UCoMS benefits will include: complete, accurate status of drilling and reservoir conditions; optimal utilization of oil and gas reservoirs; improved detection and location of potential oil and gas pipeline leakage, platform damage, and hostile intrusions by people or animals; improved safety of oil and gas platforms; and the ability to analyze real-time data with archived data and scenarios to precisely locate and quickly remove the causes of risk problems and the eventual possibility of foreseeing or predicting them. “We also envision employing UCoMS's huge computing power and data storage and sophisticated analysis ability to automatically make drilling decisions, added Tzeng. Besides Tzeng, the project’s key participants include seven co-principal investigators: Magdy A. Bayoumi, director, ULL Center for Advanced Computer Studies (CACS); Hongyi Wu and Dmitri Perkins, CACS assistant professors; H. Edward Seidel, director, LSU Center for Computation and Technology; Gabrielle Allen, LSU associate professor of computer science, Christopher D. White, LSU assistant professor of petroleum engineering; and John Dyer, SU professor of computer science. In addition, the research cluster has another four faculty researchers, a postdoctoral researcher, an information technology analyst, and 19 graduate and undergraduate students. Industrial partners are, among others, Stone Energy Corporation and Fenstermaker & Associates, Inc., both in Lafayette, and Landmark Graphics in Austin, Texas. Resources supporting the UCoMS project include interconnected workstations, servers, storage devices, a computational grid composed of a 96-node cluster system at ULL, and LSU's SuperMike, a computer cluster with 1,024 Pentium4 processors and one of the world's fastest supercomputers.