Foster Finlay Associates (ffA) has teamed with Mercury Computer Systems to deliver ‘next-generation’ visual computing tools for seismic interpretation. ffA’s 3D seismic analysis software is to be ported to graphics processing unit (GPU) based compute engines using Mercury’s Open Inventor and VolumeViz LDM 3D graphics software development kits.
The companies expect that GPU-computed seismic analysis and GPU-based surface extraction will increase the performance of interactive and automatic identification of faults, horizons and geo-bodies. ffA’s seismic image processing tools SVI Pro and SEA 3D Pro are to benefit from the new technology.
Mercury plans to integrate GPU-based geometry and volume processing capability in Open Inventor by 2009, providing a ‘high-level framework’ for integration of GPU visualization and computation. Visualization components will be directly linked to GPU-computed data, avoiding transfer between CPU and GPU.
ffA CTO Steve Purves said, ‘GPU-based computing will bring a new wave of highly interactive data driven interpretation tools for the analysis of very large 3D data sets.’ In an earlier announcement (OITJ June 2008) ffA teamed with Nvidia to leverage GPU-based number crunching in SVI Pro.
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