British oil giant BP is building a new supercomputing facility at its U.S. offices in Houston that it will use to go farther, faster and deeper in its global search for oil and gas.
The effort is part of a race to the top by Big Oil, as other major energy companies are tooling with high-performance computing. Officials from Chevron, Shell Oil, Exxon Mobil and French oil and gas firm Total are expected to join BP officials at a high-performance computing workshop at Rice University in February, according to BP.
In a briefing with reporters Thursday, company officials said construction has begun on the three-story, 110,000 square foot facility that will house what they are billing as the largest supercomputing complex for commercial research in the world.
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