Maximus for Seismic Energy Industries

TURBO-CHARGED INTERPRETATION

As world’s leading energy companies continue to push the boundaries of technology to find oil and gas fields more cost effectively, the scope and complexity of seismic data processing and interpretation is growing exponentially. Multi-survey, multi-resolution datasets rich with advanced attributes such as azimuth and illumination easily exceed 100GB and are commonplace. At stake is the ability to extract value from this large volume of seismic data to reduce uncertainties, improve the accuracy of reservoir predictions and mitigate the risk associated with extremely expensive drilling and production activities.

The speed and accuracy of seismic interpretation is critical in the exploration workflow to gain fast and clear insight into the important details of the underlying geological formation. However, traditional interpretation methods are increasingly challenged by the volume of data, fewer experts in the industry, and the influx of new hires pushing innovation for personal productivity such as augmented reality and auto-extraction.

NVIDIA Maximus platform combines the interactive visualization capability of NVIDIA Quadro® GPUs and the extreme computing power of NVIDIA Tesla® GPUs into a single workstation and delivers the computational horsepower needed for real-time calculation of seismic trace attributes and visual analysis of complex regional basins right at the interpreter’s desk. The result is dramatically reduced model processing cycle times and sharper images of region-of-interest datasets leading to increased competitive advantage for lease bidding, higher service revenues and ultimately greater chances of striking oil.

WHAT THE EXPERTS ARE SAYING

"Paradigm actively seeks to take advantage of new hardware technologies, such as NVIDIA Maximus technology, to improve our customers’ performance and efficiency. By significantly accelerating the calculation of seismic trace attributes, interpreters can evaluate new workflows and practices to gain more from their seismic data investment."

Laura Evins, Product manager of seismic attributes at Paradigm.

"aAFE delivers the most accurate fault interpretation results in the industry, but there is some inconvenience to users waiting on day-long processing tasks, even though they are saving weeks of tedious fault interpretation. GPU computing has taken away that hurdle, reducing processing times by a factor of more than 10x. Utilizing just a Quadro 6000 graphics card, the process already will execute in just a few hours; by adding NVIDIA Maximus technology that adds the NVIDIA Tesla co-processor, our customers will realize a further, dramatic reduction in compute times."

Philip Neri, Vice President of Marketing at TerraSpark.

"Geological Expression is all about maximising the amount of geological information that you can rapidly extract from 3D seismic. We’ve been working across multiple Quadro and Tesla GPUs in our workstations to do this for some time. Now, with NVIDIA Maximus certification for GeoTeric, and the additional supporting technology that comes with it, it is much easier for our clients to procure the Geological Expression platforms that are going to take their interpretation workflows to new levels of productivity."

Steve Purves, Director of Technology at ffA.