Using IBM System x clusters powered by the latest Intel Xeon processor 5500 series will enable upstream petroleum engineers to make significant improvements in the understanding and the solution of some very challenging problems in exploration and production. For competitive advantage, the industry has developed sophisticated multidimensional seismic imaging and very accurate multi- component, multi-scale, reservoir models to further increase the probability of finding and recovering oil. These innovative computational solutions are more imperative in the years ahead as exploration must increasingly occur in environmentally hostile regions such as in deep water, wide basins with salt mounds, Siberia, and Alaska. This shift has entailed a continuing investment by upstream petroleum engineers, geoscientists, mathematicians, and computer scientists to develop new algorithms and enhance applications for parallel computing environments. This investment will be protected as newer and more powerful cluster systems become available with continuing innovations from IBM and Intel. As before, the payoff will far outweigh this investment as energy costs continue to escalate.