Cray’s High-Density GPU System Sets New Performance Standard for ECHELON Reservoir Simulation Software

SEATTLE, WA and NEW ORLEANS, LA--(Marketwired - Oct 20, 2015) - At the 2015 Society of Exploration Geophysicists International Exposition and 85^th Annual Meeting (SEG) in New Orleans, Louisiana, global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced the achievement of a new performance benchmark for reservoir simulations using Stone Ridge Technology's ECHELON reservoir simulation software and the Cray® CS-Storm™ cluster supercomputer.

ECHELON models oil, water and gas flows in a reservoir, and is specifically designed for leveraging GPU compute architectures. It has proven scalability across multiple GPUs, and by running on the Cray CS-Storm system, ECHELON can offer distinct benefits over other commercially available reservoir simulators. ECHELON and the Cray CS-Storm system can run high-resolution reservoir models more rapidly than any other commercially available system, and the joint solution is designed to deliver higher degrees of accuracy without compromising production schedules.

"Runtime performance is absolutely vital in the oil and gas industry, playing a critical role in reservoir simulation," said Vincent Natoli, Founder/CEO, Stone Ridge Technology. "Cray offers the highest performing GPU-packed compute infrastructure on the market, and ECHELON running on its CS-Storm system delivers unprecedented speed that can be used by reservoir engineers to study many more realizations of their models and run large, high-resolution cases. We have demonstrated results on a 243 million-cell model running out 45 years on just two CS-Storm nodes completing in about two-and-a-half hours. The ability to do more in a smaller hardware footprint brings significant and welcome cost savings and productivity improvements at a very competitive time in the energy industry."

"With ECHELON and the Cray CS-Storm system, reservoir engineers now have the ability to run multiple realizations in a single day," said Bert Beals, director for Cray's Energy segment. "Performance requirements in the oil and gas industry, and particularly around reservoir simulation, are driven by demand for new oil fields and evaluation of existing fields for future investment. Speed, reliability and scalability are all important factors, and ECHELON running on our GPU-packed Cray CS-Storm system will provide oil and gas customers with a powerful solution for successfully evaluating the potential of both new and old reservoirs."

The Cray CS-Storm system enables highly scalable GPU computing for mission-critical applications in areas such as energy, manufacturing, earth sciences, life sciences, financial services, machine learning and geospatial intelligence. Each CS-Storm chassis combines eight NVIDIA® Tesla® K40 or K80 GPU accelerators with Intel® Xeon® processors. A single chassis equipped with Tesla K80s delivers 15 teraflops of peak performance, and a full petaflop requires just three racks.

The Cray CS-Storm system is designed to provide highly reliable operation while driving all eight 300W GPUs at maximum performance. The system is available with a unique Cray Programming Environment, enabling users to leverage the parallelism available from GPUs, and sophisticated systems management for lights-out computing. Optional liquid-cooled rear-door heat exchangers enable room-neutral cooling.

For more details on the ECHELON benchmark study results, click here. More information on the Cray CS-Storm system is available at www.cray.com.

About Stone Ridge Technology (SRT)
Stone Ridge Technology markets ECHELON, a high performance petroleum reservoir simulator based on GPUs and GAMPACK, its GPU-based linear solver. Headquartered in Maryland, the company employs a top-tier team of physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians and electrical engineers. For more information, visit the company website at www.stoneridgetechnology.com.

About Cray Inc.
Global supercomputing leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) provides innovative systems and solutions enabling scientists and engineers in industry, academia and government to meet existing and future simulation and analytics challenges. Leveraging more than 40 years of experience in developing and servicing the world's most advanced supercomputers, Cray offers a comprehensive portfolio of supercomputers and big data storage and analytics solutions delivering unrivaled performance, efficiency and scalability. Cray's Adaptive Supercomputing vision is focused on delivering innovative next-generation products that integrate diverse processing technologies into a unified architecture, allowing customers to meet the market's continued demand for realized performance. Go to www.cray.com for more information.

Cray is a registered trademark of Cray Inc. in the United States and other countries, and CS-Storm and CS400 are trademarks of Cray Inc. Other product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.