Another win for NVidia comes in the use of their hardware for Seismic Data Analysis for a whole host of applications, including the simulation of the data.
OpenGeoSolutions, a seismic data analysis company that pioneered the use of spectral decomposition and inversion, has reported a 55 times performance increase after upgrading to the Tesla C1060 GPU.
“We are measuring speedups from two hours to two minutes using CUDA and the Tesla C1060,” says James Allison, president of OpenGeoSolutions. “This kind of performance increase is totally unprecedented and in a market where there is great economic value in being able to determine these fine sub-surface details, this is a game changer.”
And once the simulation is complete, you can visualize it as well:
FfA is working with a company called Mercury that provides the Open Inventor visualisation package used in the software to build CUDA into this step.
“We expect to have tools out in March next year which uses CUDA in this interactive way. That will allow us to do much more, it’s much easier to write sophisticated algorithms using CUDA,” says Purves.
Finally volume processing, which can often be a slow process on a data set of several gigabytes, is performed again using multiple GPUs to calculate the final volume. The IFC has isolated 3 classes (right): the gas chimney (red), the high amplitude peaks (yellow) and high amplitude troughs (blue).
The complexity of the gas chimney and the distribution of the amplitude anomalies are now easy to interpret from the detailed 3D representation.
This is the type of geoviz work I did until lately, so very cool to see this. Especially in the early exploration phase, using a fast GPU to go through petabytes of data to identify amplitude anomalies and demarcate volumes is a lifesaver.