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7X24 MAGAZINE FALL 2015
I. INTRODUCTION
built in 1982, the exploration and
petroleum engineering Computer
Center (eCC) is designed to provide
state of the art technologies and
computing power to enable saudi
aramco geologists, geophysicists and
petroleum engineers to explore,
develop and manage saudi arabia’s
oil and gas reserves. while the
majority of these technologies and
services are powered by high
performance clusters, a significant
number of services are still hosted on
traditional servers.
in saudi aramco’s exploration
activities, hpC continues to play a
critical role in enhancing geologist’s
and geophysicist’s ability to interpret
the subsurface of the earth more
accurately. the ability to run complex
codes and algorithms on large
amounts of seismic data and
outputting very detailed images of
the earth are only possible by utilizing
the massive computing power of
clusters. similarly, major resources are
required to allow petroleum engineers
to simulate large geological models
of reservoirs to understand fluid flow
behaviors [1].
although hpC provides the resources
to addresses the high computational
needs in the oil and gas industry,
many challenges are associated with
the large amount of hardware in data
centers and the growth rate of the
that hardware. one of the main
challenges is ensuring the availability
of the entire it infrastructure by
utilizing the appropriate it
infrastructure monitoring solution.
a wide variety of monitoring solutions
exists in today’s market, ranging from
free monitoring systems such as
nagios [1] and zabbix [2] to
by
abdullah aldhamin & bander alotaibi
Abstract – In recent years, there has been a growing practice among IT organizations to deploy
Business Service Management (BSM) solutions. In this paper we describe and share Saudi Aramco’s
EXPEC Computer Center (ECC)—a leading scientific HPC-based data center—experience and
recommendations in choosing and deploying a business service management solution to model,
manage and monitor our IT resources.