Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) has completed deployment of a Sun and Linux-based high performance computing cluster, which will be used for oil reservoir simulations and other intensive computing tasks.

The 154 node cluster is based on Sun Fire x4100 entry level servers using AMD Opteron processors, running Red Hat Linux Enterprise Edition. The deployment was managed by Sun executive partner Kuwait Diyar Company.

According to KOC, the company was looking for a powerful, yet cost effective solution that would enable them to run simulations much more quickly than previously, and also tackle multiple tasks at once. The system has now cut the time required for complex simulation studies from days to weeks.