Houston-based seismic imaging boutique Panorama Technologies reports a six fold speed up using Nvidia’s Tesla GPUs over CPU-only hardware. Panorama’s ‘Merlin’ seismic acquisition design too simulated a 12 second, wide azimuth shot over a 16 sq. km. block in 12 minutes on using a single Tesla board. Panorama also uses Teslas for imaging with its Marvell code base. CEO Chris Bednar told Oil IT Journal, ‘$250,000 worth of hardware can turn around a 30,000 shot deepwater wide azimuth survey in a couple of weeks.’ Code was ported to the Tesla at the compiler level. While CUDA and OpenCL are supposed to hide the complexity of the GPU, ‘optimization is always hard work.’ 25% percent of Panorama’s compute capacity is now GPU-based. This will double as more Tesla GPUs based on the Fermi architecture are installed. More from www.oilit.com/links/1012_8.
This article originally appeared in Oil IT Journal 2010 Issue # 12.
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