Behind the Scenes of Pangea 4, TotalEnergies' Hybrid Supercomputer

Centre Scientifique et Technique Jean Féger (CSTJF)
Pau, France

“Here is Pangea 4, our new supercomputer. It's much more compact than the previous one, it's more energy efficient and better adapted to the Company's ambitions.”

[Pangea 4 & Pangea@Cloud the hybrid High Performance Calculator]

Emmanuelle Brechet, Data Technologies VP, OneTech: The supercomputer is for subsurface imaging, searching for oil and gas where we have lots of data. To compute the image, we need big computers. It's like an ultrasound scan of the earth. Pangea 4 gives us a three-dimensional image of the earth and shows us how fluids flow through it.

Fabrice Cantos, HPC Infrastructure Specialist, OneTech: So essentially, Pangea 4 is a supercomputer equivalent to about 50,000 personal computers. It uses 80% less energy than the last version. We made technical choices for the parts, and also for cooling, to improve efficiency and cut our carbon emissions.

Emmanuelle Brechet: We need these computers for our forecasts. Forecasts for oil and gas production, but in the futur , for wind and solar as well. Having this computing power means we can make our own predictions as to where we put our plants.

Joël Da Sival Bandeira, HPC Cloud Platform Leader, OneTech: Pangea 4 has a new solution in the Cloud. We call it Pangea@Cloud. For example, if we need resources today, with many of us launching simulations at the same time, there's always a point where you have to wait your turn. In the Cloud, it's different because when you ask for resources, you get them straight away. It's faster, more flexible. Today, we've got a permanent user base of 100 users a day. If we have 1,000 users tomorrow, we can quickly absorb them without any changes to the platform.

Emmanuelle Brechet: Cybersecurity challenges were very important. Our data centers process very sensitive data.

Joël Da Sival Bandeira: That's why there's a whole layer of cybersecurity we had to implement to secure the platform.

“Hi Joël, how are you?
- All right?
- Yep.
- Everything looking good?
- Yes, it's fine, doing the job.”

Joël Da Sival Bandeira: So the contact we had with Vincente on the projet, it was almost every day, because he's a key user, who tested the very first version of the platform, so he was doing tests.

Vincente Onwuchekwa, Reservoir Engineer and Product Owner, OneTech: Actually we were in touch all the time. I gave early feedback for the users. And Joël then responded to those needs.

Joël Da Sival Bandeira: Without that daily contact, we couldn't have built the platform they're using today. It was very important for us that key users like Vincente, adopt the solution to then help users adopt the platform.

Fabrice Cantos: Pangea 4 was a technical project, and today it's used by 100 people every day in all four corners of the globe and the Company's different segments.

Emmanuelle Brechet: Pangea 4 was designed to be scalable. What does that mean? We can make it bigger. Whether that's the actual machine or the Cloud computing capacity, if people express new needs, and they already have, we'll be able to increase computing power, either in Pau or on the Cloud.