Tsunami Development of Houston has been granted a US patent for its technique for seismic processing with Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). FPGAs are hardware devices with programmable logic components and programmable interconnects. FPGAs can be programmed to perform filtering and other math functions.
Pipelines
The Tsunami patent leverages FPGAs to provide a highly parallel computation where ‘a thousand pipelines or more are implemented.’ Parts of seismic traces can be distributed across FPGAs for processing and reformed to a 3D image. Tsunami claims to have created an ‘easy-to-use, leading edge solution for imaging prestack seismic data’ with FPGA technology.
INT
Partner Interactive Network Technologies (INT) is providing user interface and display capabilities and S2S Systems is building a 2D/3D velocity analysis package using the technology. Tsunami is also working with Cray on an FPGA-based supercomputer, the Cray XD1, which will be capable of cost effective ‘reverse time wave equation migration.’
IBM
IBM is also working with Tsunami to leverage its ‘Blue Gene’ in seismic processing. Blue Gene is now available as a 32 CPU dual core PowerPC-based motherboard—around 2,000 CPU’s per rack and up to 1TB memory.
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