HDF at the 2015 Oil & Gas High Performance Computing Workshop
Quincey Koziol, The HDF Group
Photo from nasa.gov
Perhaps the original producers of “big data,” the oil & gas (O&G) industry held its eighth annual High-Performance Computing (HPC) workshop in early March. Hosted by Rice University, the workshop brings in attendees from both the HPC and petroleum industries.
Jan Odegard, the workshop organizer, invited me to the workshop to give a tutorial and short update on HDF5.
The workshop (#oghpc) has grown a great deal during the last few years and now has more than 500 people attending, with preliminary attendance numbers for this year’s workshop over 575 people (even in a “down” year for the industry). In fact, Jan’s pushing it to a “conference” next year, saying, “any workshop with more attendees than Congress is really a conference.” But it’s still a small enough crowd and venue that most people know each other well, both on the Oil & Gas and HPC sides.
The workshop program had two main tracks, one on HPC-oriented technologies that support the industry, and one on oil & gas technologies and how they can leverage HPC. The HPC track is interesting, but mostly “practical” and not research-oriented, unlike, for example, the SC technical track. The oil & gas track seems more research-focused, in ways that can enable the industry to be more productive.
I gave an hour and a half tutorial on developing and tuning parallel HDF5 applications, which