When it comes to understanding the world under the Earth's surface, computers are turning out to be an oil company's best friend.

France's Total is the most recent of the Big Oil elite to announce ventures into a new level of high-level computing. Last week, it introduced its Pangea supercomputer, which will process geologic data to help Total geologists more accurately decide how and where to drill wells.

And it will help them do it faster, as the oil industry once again pushes the frontiers of computing in the search for oil.

“It is absolutely true that the seismic industry, probably next to the Defense Department, has always been the biggest user of computer power,” said Peter Duncan, CEO of Microseismic, a Houston-based geophysical service company.

He said processing seismic data was among the early tasks of the Whirlwind Computer built for the military in the late '40s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As with smartphones and other technology, the quest for the best supercomputer is perpetual.

Total's Pangea, located in the city of Pau in southwest France, has a computing capacity of 2.3 quadrillion operations per second. The company says that's equivalent to 27,000 office computers and puts Pangea among the 10 most powerful computers in the world.

The news follows BP's recent announcement of plans to open a new computing facility next year in Houston, with central processing units that can process data at 2 quadrillion calculations per second — up more than 60 percent from its current computing systems.

And Exxon Mobil has touted its supercomputer in an in-house magazine, saying its calculating abilities are in the “next-generation” of quadrillions per second. The company declined to disclose its exact speed when the Houston Chronicle inquired.

“Each company likes to get the best computer, and they stay there about six months,” said Ramanan Krishnamoorti, a professor and chief energy officer at the University of Houston. “What people in the industry really care about is the number of calculations it can do per second and the amount of capacity of data storage.”

The power of Pangea and its speedy peers is critical to grind through the reams of data geologists collect in seismic imaging, which uses sound waves to collect data about the underground geology.

“You can think of a faster computer as like having a bigger lens, so that you get a sharper picture or look at more area faster,” Duncan said. “We cannot fully model or image the data exactly — we have to make some assumptions, and those assumptions make the picture just a little fuzzy. If you get a better computer, you make fewer assumptions, and in the same amount of time, get a more complete solution.”

When the seismic data industry started a few decades ago, it only measured two dimensions, but improvements in computer processing have allowed the addition of a third and even fourth dimension, with time now used as one of the variables.

“What you want to tell in real time is how the reservoir is changing,” Krishnamoorti said. “That is the big challenge — is there enough information to describe the changes? They are looking at sound waves propagating through the reservoirs, and from that, they start to interpret how the reservoir is changing with time.”

The industry practice of collecting data traces back decades, albeit with less sophisticated technology.

“When seismic began to be used around the Gulf Coast of Texas to find oil back in the 1920s and 1930s, there was a technician on the crew whose job it was to develop the films that captured the analog records, with all those wiggles,” Duncan said. “That guy was called 'the computer.'”

The seismic industry has moved beyond that, but geologists still have been limited in how much of the seismic data can be used because the computers have not been able to handle the sheer quantity of the information.

“We send a sound signal down to the earth and capture it when it comes back to the surface, and all the time it is traveling down and coming back up, it is collecting information about the earth it passes through,” Duncan said. “The earth is a very complicated structure — it's a lot of data.”

The seismic imaging process may involve a surface grid of several hundred square miles, comprising 100-by-100-foot squares.

Sound waves generated by explosives, air guns or mechanical vibrators penetrate the grid vertically, often several miles deep, and the behavior of the sound waves underground is sampled 500 times a second to provide clues about what lies beneath.

The faster processors open the doors for projects and allow those collecting the data and the geologists, who interpret the data, to exchange information and make needed adjustments.

“They are now doing in weeks what back in the early 1990s we didn't think would be possible in 30 years,” said Kenny Laughlin, manager of geophysics for Halliburton's Landmark Software and Services.

“Projects that used to take two years now take six months. You are processing the data faster, which allows for more interaction with interpretation — it allows for a shorter cycle — and it allows us to improve the image. This has been a goal in the industry for years.”