SeismicCity Improves Depth Perception using NVIDIA GPUs

By DE Editors

Depth migrated section of a complex geological model revealing clear subsalt exploration targets.

NVIDIA (Santa Clara, CA) announced that Houston-based SeismicCity is using NVIDIA Tesla S1070 1U systems for Reverse Time Migration (RTM) — one of the most advanced seismic imaging techniques ever used by the oil and gas industry — as it offered the fastest and most scalable implementation to run complex algorithms enabling discovery of new oil and gas reserves.

NVIDIA says its is the first to market with production implementations of GPU-based accelerators that enable specialized seismic processing; tasks that are resource-prohibitive on CPU-based clusters. Each Tesla 10-series processor has 240 cores, providing 1 Teraflop of processing power, along with 4GB of onboard memory.

The new NVIDIA Tesla S1070 1U system features four Tesla 10-series processors —  for a total of 960 cores and 4 Teraflops of processing power.

With an increased need to boost domestic U.S. oil production coupled with a tenfold increase in seismic datasets in the last three years, there has never been a more important time for the oil and gas industry to explore new ways of discovering new reserves.

For details on the NVIDIA Tesla S1070 1U systems, contact NVIDIA.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company ·s website.