Seismic image analysis specialist Foster Findlay Associates (FFA) has teamed with Nvidia to leverage graphics processing units (GPU) based number crunching in its SVI Pro seismic volume imaging and 3D visualization package. Adding Nvidia’s compute horsepower means that FFA can provide a scalable and portable solution for volume based attribute and object generation on large data volumes.
Purves
Steve Purves, FFA’s Technical Director, said, ‘The advanced processing capabilities within our SVI Pro and SEA 3D software applications together with the HPC capabilities provided by NVIDIA CUDA-enabled graphics processing units (GPUs), will have a direct impact on hydrocarbon exploration and production by changing the way in which geoscientists work with and analyse 3D Seismic data.’ FFA will integrate NVIDIA CUDA technology with SVI Pro on both Windows and Linux platforms over the next 18 months.
Mercury
In a separate announcement, Mercury Computer Systems’ Visualization Sciences Group is also leveraging CUDA to deliver massive parallel computation and 3D visualization capabilities to E&P applications. Mercury has integrated CUDA with its Open Inventor 3D development toolkit for compute-intensive E&P data analysis, interpretation, and simulation—providing ‘interoperability between 3D visualization and the computation on the fly.’ Open Inventor components include VolumeViz LDM (visualization of large pre and post stack seismic data) and ReservoirViz LDM (reservoir modeling and simulation.)
Tesla 10
Finally, on the GPU hardware front, NVIDIA has announced the Tesla 10 series with ‘double the precision and performance.’ The top of the range Tesla S1070 unit provides up to 4 Teraflops per 1U system, double precision IEEE 754 match and 16 Gigabytes of memory per 1U system. A one rack unit (1U) S1070 1U system will retail at $7,999 when it ships in August 2008.
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