Funny, I just found that link myself. I guess it makes sense, there was data and there was a need to comb through it. Seems like little to do with graphics directly, and more to do with being able to manage large amounts of data.
"Seems like little to do with graphics directly, and more to do with being able to manage large amounts of data"
And since we are visual beings, managing large amounts of data is best done in a graphical way. But it is not easy to do that right. You can create super beautiful looking, but total missleading visualisations.
Also a quick search found this from 1985: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/003754978504400...:
> Supercomputers are becoming a useful and important tool in the finding and developing of oil and gas reserves. Applications of supercomputers in the petroleum industry involve two important aspects: enormous computational power and massive data management. Vector computers are being used in petroleum engineering to simulate the flow of oil and gas in a reservoir, the faster performance of the vector machines making many, heretofore, unmanageable calculations possible. In exploration for oil and gas, supercomputers are being used to store, classify, and interpret huge amounts of geophysical seismic data.