NVIDIA Tesla Transforms Seismic Modeling

By DE Editors

At the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG; Las Vegas, NV), OpenGeoSolutions (Calgary, Alberta, Canada) reported gaining a 55x performance boost in geological structures analysis using GPU computing to find oil and gas.

OpenGeoSolutions uses a technique called Spectral Decomposition to reveal geological information that goes beyond classic seismic resolution and detection. On a CPU-based cluster, this process could take anywhere from two hours to several days. The quality of the data produced by this technique is improved when large regional datasets are processed, but more importantly when that data is "inverted," allowing it to be translated into real geological structures.

In an effort to improve this, the OpenGeoSolutions team acquired a workstation equipped with an NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPU Computing processor, based on the NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing architecture.

In six weeks the OpenGeoSolutions team converted a key portion of their application to CUDA and, as a result, witnessed an order of magnitude increase in performance.

OpenGeoSolutions provides spectral decomposition and inversion services along with commercial support for an open source seismic processing system called FreeUSP. Several major, independent and national oil companies use FreeUSP software to refine their geological models and locate valuable hydrocarbon reserves.

For more information on NVIDIA Tesla computing solutions C1060, visit NVIDIA.

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