By Jeffrey T. Lewis

SAO PAULO--Brazilian oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA, or Petrobras, is continuing its program of investing in supercomputing technology to speed up its exploration and production activities and is currently installing what will be the fastest supercomputer in South America in its Rio de Janeiro data center.

Big oil companies need to crunch immense amounts of data to speed up the process of deciding where to drill, and the faster they can make those determinations, the more money they save and the quicker they can begin production from new wells, according to Marcelo Carreras, Petrobras's executive manager of information technology and telecommunications.

"Not using a supercomputer means a loss for companies, because we have much better visibility, more precision, in the exploration of areas when we use one," he said. "It's fundamental, it allows us to cut costs and risks in exploration."

The company expects to start using the new computer, nicknamed Dragon, in the second quarter. Once it's up and running, it will be among the 40 fastest supercomputers in the world, with computing capacity equivalent to four million top-notch cellphones of 100,000 laptops, and will be the fifth-fastest in the corporate world, Mr. Carreras said.

Petrobras invested about 100 million reais, the equivalent of $18.5 million, on the new computer and has invested more than 350 million reais on its supercomputing program. The company currently owns the two fastest supercomputers in South America, which will both be bumped down a notch when Dragon enters operation, Mr. Carreras said.

It's money well spent, according to Nicolas Simone, director of innovation and digital transformation at the company. The company's two older supercomputers had already paid for themselves more than eight times over after six months and the Dragon will make analyses up to 30 times faster, Mr. Simone said.

"What we can do in 30 days now we'll be able to do in one day" with Dragon, he said, adding he expects a very fast return on the investment in Dragon, too. "It means savings that impact the value that we can add as a company. It means not drilling dry holes."

Petrobras has been selling off many assets it considers to be noncore, such as onshore fields and fields in shallow waters, to focus its investment and exploration efforts on its rich fields in ultra-deep water off the coasts of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo states. The area is known as the pre-salt because it lies under a vast layer of salt that itself is deep beneath the sea.

With those conditions, the company's geologists can use all the help they get from Dragon and its predecessors, which provide them with clearer images of the areas it studies. Petrobras has been investing in improving its computer analyses since the 1960s, and the company would have had a hard time even finding the pre-salt fields without that technology, Mr. Simone said.

"Work in ultra-deep water requires a lot of analysis," he said. "You have about 2.5 kilometers of water [under the ocean's surface], then about another 2.5 kilometers of drilling. To work at that depth is as complex as working on the moon."

Petrobras is still completing the installation of Dragon, which was assembled by French technology company Groupe Bull SA using components from equipment makers including Intel Corp. and Nvidia Corp.

The parts were shipped to the Brazilian city of Manaus, which has a duty-free area that many technology companies use to assemble electronic products for sale in the country, and assembled there. Once finished, the computer was flown to Sao Paulo's Guarulhos airport and then shipped to Rio in 10 trucks.

While the supercomputers are designed to crunch the company's algorithms for petroleum exploration, Petrobras also has donated their use for recent research projects to combat the coronavirus. One of those projects helped hospitals repair and re-use more than 2,000 ventilators that have saved more than 20,000 lives, and another developed methods to identify people infected with the virus.

Write to Jeffrey T. Lewis at jeffrey.lewis@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

This article was corrected at 1:30 p.m. ET to reflect that Marcelo Carreras is Petrobras's executive manager of information technology and telecommunications. The original version incorrectly spelled his last name and gave an incorrect title.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

01-11-21 1022ET