APPLICATIONS

Leader in Geological Structures Analysis Gets 55x Performance Boost Using GPU Computing to find Oil and Gas: SEG 2008 -- Geophysicists in the oil and gas industry are seeking more accurate images of what lies beneath the earth. In order to find what's been buried for millions of years, Calgary-based OpenGeoSolutions uses a technique called "Spectral Decomposition" specifically to reveal geological information that goes beyond classic seismic resolution and detection. 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. On a CPU-based cluster, this process could take anywhere from 2 hours to several days. In an effort to improve this, the 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. "We are measuring speedups from 2 hours to 2 minutes using CUDA and the Tesla C1060," said James Allison, president of OpenGeoSolutions, Inc. "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." "More importantly, the Tesla products essentially give us all a personal supercomputer," Mr. Allison added. "Just one Tesla C1060 delivers the same performance as our 64 CPU cluster, and this was a resource we had to share. This is a huge cost and time saving that has transformed our workflow and boosted our productivity." 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 please visit its Web site. For more information on OpenGeoSolutions, please visit its Web site.