NVIDIA Corporation and GeoStar, a leading Chinese geophysical services provider, unveiled the launch of a new hardware and software solution that will transform seismic computation for oil and gas companies in China.

Leveraging the processing power of NVIDIA® Tesla™ GPUs, GeoStar’s seismic software suite dramatically accelerates the performance of complex seismic data. Now, the computation of large datasets generated by searching the earth for oil deposits, can be achieved in smaller, more power efficient GPU based systems as compared to CPU-only based clusters.

“We are dealing with large prestack time migration datasets, which typically take more than 30 hours to run on a cluster of 66 CPUs,” said Liu Qin, general manager of GeoStar. “Just a single Tesla C1060 GPU delivers roughly the same computing power, which means we can get orders of magnitude performance increases as we add more GPUs, while dramatically saving power and cost. Tesla GPUs are truly a revolutionary solution for oil and gas exploration.”

The Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has spent recent months testing NVIDIA Tesla GPUs with GeoStar’s solution. In a computation of prestack time migration data covering 740 square kilometers, 24 Tesla GPUs completed the processing more than 600 timesi faster than a traditional cluster with 66 CPUs, a result which CAS researchers believe can be improved through additional tuning.

Tags: GeoStar, NVIDIA Corporation