Acceleware Brings Seismic Speed!

Time is money, and the seismic processing industry is discovering that faster and better-performing analytical tools can help offset mounting cost pressures. This is especially true for methods to reduce migration time.

To address challenges like this one, the industry is turning towards companies like Acceleware Corp. Based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada Acceleware specializes in the acceleration of existing software applications by utilizing multi-core hardware and proprietary middleware to process complex data.  Acceleware seismic solution is breaking ground and changing the seismic space, improving how geophysicists process their data, and reducing the critical time dedicated to migration.  The solution is centered on the company’s own application platform.  This platform is comprised of a third-party seismic processing application, which maintains a familiar user experience for the geophysicist, integrated with Acceleware APIs and library, along with an industry standard GPU supercomputer.  It is the third-party seismic platform that allows users to leverage the parallel processing power of GPUs via seismic APIs.  The end result is a dramatic increase in performance and processing power.

Acceleware’s seismic libraries have been precisely tuned to address Kirchhoff Pre-Stack Time Migration (KPSTM) data to increase processing speed with the use of NVIDIA® Tesla™ GPUs.  KPSTM is the most common seismic data-processing method used to create images of the earth’s subsurface using surface-recorded data volumes obtained from seismic reflection surveys.  The Acceleware solution provides a multi-fold performance increase to reduce lengthy processing times and delivers faster time-to-market solutions for the seismic industry. Currently, Techco’s SUMMIG is being accelerated up to 45X over a single core; this is a comparison of wall clock time for the entire migration not simply a processing loop.

The staggering memory bandwidth of GPU accelerators contributes to the increased performance and provides industry professionals the opportunity to process data significantly faster with no loss of quality.  Often, geophysicists are forced to trade quality of results for reasonable completion times.  The performance boost provided by Acceleware enables the geophysicist to complete more iterations within a set timeframe, increasing the image fidelity.  The solution is packaged in a standard 1U configuration that contains four GPUs along with two 1U standard CPU servers, and seamlessly integrates within the existing server environment.

Industry leaders have the added benefit of utilizing 75 percent less space and 65 percent less power with Acceleware’s software solution; enabling an increase in processing capability within their existing environmental footprint.  The massive compute capability provides increased performance with a single GPU, up to 500 GFlops of peak calculation performance.  Those in the industry are beginning to value lower rental costs for server floor space and dramatically lower power costs.

“In the never ending search for the best price per performance product in the computer world, Acceleware stands out,” said Rick Steele, president of P-Wave. “Their GPU processors allow you to significantly increase your compute power and keep the cost of power and cooling in check.”

Seismic solutions developed by Acceleware are revolutionizing the oil and gas industry today by offering increased performance and processing superpower.  Natural resources are able to be recovered in record time and computing large data sets is now a viable notion, combined with decreased energy costs and consumption.  Geophysicists can now process seismic data with Acceleware in a desk-side or datacenter configuration and unveil their own parallel processing capability.