Woodside achieves computing milestone

Woodside Petroleum has hailed the benefits of Amazon Web Services computing infrastructure on the same day the state government signed a deal with AWS.

The oil and gas major announced it had become one of few companies worldwide to simultaneously use more than one million virtual Central Processing Units (vCPUs) on AWS infrastructure across three regions in the US.

The vCPUs performed full-waveform inversion on 3,200 square kilometres worth of seismic data from Woodside’s Greater Sunrise gas resource, in offshore Timor-Leste.

Woodside likened the computing power to “a stack of standard laptops 4.2 kilometres high”.

Chief technology officer Shaun Gregory said the extra capacity accelerated seismic results in less than two hours.

“Being able to get seismic results in hours – about 150 times faster – means that we can be decision-ready sooner,” Mr Gregory said.

“It is another example of how our technology work program, which is only a few years old, is delivering proven value to the business while making work even more meaningful and engaging for our people.”

AWS is the company’s strategic cloud provider, following a new partnership this year.

AWS vice president of engineering Bill Vass said Woodside was the first energy company to reach the million-vCPU scale.

Woodside shares were trading 0.8 per cent higher at 3:08pm AEDT, to $22.38 each.

At the same time, the state government has entered into a Common Use Arrangement (CUA) with AWS to give state and local governments, universities and other entities access to the AWS platform.

The arrangement will also support greater transparency of expenditure on goods and services, the state government said, as well as reduce duplication and administrative costs for agencies.

The CUA forms part of the state government’s ICT Strategy for 2016 to 2020, which involves adopting cloud-based services.

“Consumption-based services have the potential to replace costly, redundant, low-scale in-house computing infrastructure and provide more rapid, agile, scalable and cost-effective ICT services,” the state government said.

“By utilising cloud services agencies will be positioned to deliver higher quality and value for money digital services to the public.”