Technical Breakfast

 The Kaleidoscope Project: Breaking the Sound Barrier in Seismic Imaging.      
 

 The subsalt exploration targets in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico have changed through time following maturation of new geological play concepts closely related to the evolution of seismic imaging algorithms.   Current seismic imaging technology is not yet good enough to image properly the geological structures below the salt.  

 

Reverse Time Migration (RTM) is the imaging technology expected to fulfill the demands of the existing exploration challenges.   Seismic imaging improvement largely depends on compute power and on the correct implementation on the hardware of the algorithms used for processing.

 

 The evolution of imaging algorithms has largely depended upon the evolution of hardware.  In fact, during the last eight years, the computing power needed for seismic imaging in the oil industry has increased by two orders of magnitude, and the storage requirements, and therefore I/O needs, has increased by three orders of magnitude.  

 

Seismic Imaging has evolved very fast due to the astonishing price/performance characteristics of Commodity Off-the-Shelf (COTS) Technology High Performance Computing (HPC) that made Linux PC Clusters affordable during the last decade.  However, the hardware technology that favored the seismic imaging revolution has hit the power wall when it is most needed, i.e. when RTM is the next chapter in the evolution of seismic imaging.  

 

New hardware alternatives like FPGA’s, GPGPU’s and heterogeneous multicore processors (Cell/B.E.) are constantly scrutinized as the replacement of the homogeneous processor technology.  

 

However, there is no clear consensus about the path to follow and there are currently several initiatives in the industry.   The Kaleidoscope Project is a “dream team” partnership of top geophysicists, computer scientists and organizations from around the world that are creating a major advance in computerized techniques for seismic imaging.  The Kaleidoscope Project now makes possible the full realization of the next generation seismic imaging technology that accelerates and streamlines oil and gas exploration. The algorithms being developed are tailored to the new generation of IBM’s Cell /B.E. processors.  

 

Project benchmarks show that the Cell /B.E. processors perform the computation of RTM algorithms one order of magnitude faster than leading brand processors