Introducing the 10th anniversary edition of the Rice oil and gas high performance computing conference, chairman Jan Odegard outlined an expanding role for HPC that includes, along with its traditional seismic imaging home ground, big data applications in operations and management, deep learning techniques and the convergence of existing systems into next-generation architectures.
Cathal Ó Broin from the Irish centre for high-end computing introduced ‘ExSeisPiol’ aka extreme-scale parallel I/O for seismic workflows. ESP was developed with support from Tullow Oil to handle real-world issues of multiple SEG-Y versions and data stored in legacy formats. The ESP C/C++ API and stack builds on Data Direct Networks’ Infinite Memory Engine’s burst-buffer technology. This uses high performance flash storage to enhance noncontiguous write performance. ESP will be released as open source software later this year.
Navjot Kukreja (Imperial College London) demonstrated ‘Devito’ a SciPy-based domain specific language for seismic imaging. HPC in seismics requires an intimate knowledge of physics, programming and hardware optimization. The problem is, ‘not everyone is a polymath.’ Devito exposes a symbolic math library, useable by seismologists, that hides the algorithmic/hardware complexities to ‘bring the latest in performance optimization closer to real science.’ The Devito code generator has been tested and verified on the full SEG/SEAM dataset. Devito has backing from Intel and BG Group (now Shell).
Thomas Cullison (Nvidia) introduced Occa, an open-source library used to program multi-core architectures. Devices such as CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs are abstracted using an ‘offload-model’ for application development. C and Fortran kernel languages allow developers to use run-time compilation for device kernels. The Occa API provides comparable performance across Cuda and OpenCL with code running on Intel, Nvidia and AMD hardware.
Shawn Hall (BP and OpenSFS) presented on the ‘disruptive technology’ that is OpenSFS, a vendor neutral, non-profit whose mission is to ‘keep the Lustre file system open.’ OpenSFS offers a low, flat membership fee and gives a ‘unified voice’ to the vendor community.
Dylan Copeland presented Geonumerical Solution’s ‘Argos,’ a 3D HPC simulation of hydraulic fracturing. Argos performs 3D, coupled multiphysics simulation of fractured rock mechanics, fluid dynamics, and proppant transport. Argos supports unstructured grids, fracture networks, and arbitrary configurations of multiple wellbores and completions. To date, studies have demonstrated the significance of anisotropic stress fields, near-wellbore friction, proppant bridging, and slurry rheology.
Many more presentations from Rice O&G HPC 2017 here and videos.
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