Shell International Exploration and Production - Research and Technology Services mission is to provide services, consultancy and technology to the Royal Dutch Shell s Operating Units.

The technical and IT side of this involves:
- developing new algorithms for all aspects of exploration and production.
- exploiting new IT technologies to business advantage.
- developing new ways of running very CPU and IO intensive applications

- developing new ways of running applications that require the very large data sets that are common in seismic processing.
- disseminating these technologies to the Operating Units

- provide services with the above technologies, or special studies, for Operating Units that don t have the facilities themselves.

To day 500+ UNIX systems, including a number of IMB SP2 towers, are used to do large to very large scale scientific computing in the services as well as in research areas, and for the systems development of the program suites. 1500+ customers run a standards Windows 3.11/Novell environment. Some Windows 3.11 PCs are also used for software development and providing operational support to some remote locations, some are used for lab automation systems. The PC environment is now migrating to a standard Windows NT/Office 97 environment.

As a result of this are the behaviour, limitations and possibilities of the various UNIXes, platforms, peripherals, network etc. for the above usage well understood.

The decision of Shell s EP sector to standardise on NT for its personal productivity tools in each desktop are drivers for the use PCs and thus NT in technical and research computing.

The business wants it, but experience in applying NT in all of the above areas still has to be acquired before NT can be deployed for this on a larger scale.

J.A. Verdoes
Shell International Exploration and Production BV
P.O. BOX 60
2280 AB Rijswijk
The Netherlands
e-mail: j.a.verdoes@siep.shell.com
fax +31-70-3113110