HPC PROJECTS: OIL AND GAS
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Billy. ‘This 3D data is therefore very heavy, and diffi cult to handle in the memory, and it can be very slow to display.’ VSG supplies computing components to facilitate the visualisation of these heavy datasets. ‘Most of our customers in the oil and gas industry are software vendors currently creating dedicated software for specialised tasks related to the exploration and production fi elds,’ says Billy. ‘Instead of creating and maintaining all of the visualisation capabilities of their software by themselves, our customers use our library components in order to deliver the best visualisation capabilities within their software. The end user – the geophysicist or whatever – is using our product indirectly, via the vendor who has embedded our technology within his own product.’
‘The 3D data is heavy and diffi cult to handle in the memory, and it can be very slow to display’
For the end user, powerful graphics cards (GPUs) are a prerequisite of this visualisation process, and VSG has worked to allow these GPUs to be harnessed for use in other tasks that an analyst may wish to perform on his data set. ‘Our toolkit is designed to be able to handle very large models, and the management
of these large models can be done on the visualisation side [in the GPU] as well as the computation side [in a cluster, for example]. This means that we have created an architecture that enables a software developer to perform very complex calculations on the GPU while he is displaying the data. The technology is more than just a viewer – it handles very large models that do not fi t in the memory, and it allows developers to use this facility to run code on the visualisation models. This is very useful for calculating seismic attributes on the fl y – information contained within the seismic data. We are not supplying high-performance computing tools, but rather we are supplying high-performance visualisation tools that take advantage of the computational capabilities of GPUs, and which also provide developers with a framework and toolset to develop HPC code linked to visualisation.’
Close ties
In practice, VSG works very closely with GPU developer Nvidia, as Billy explains: ‘We have a partnership with Nvidia with regards to their Cuda technology, but we have built what we call an abstraction layer into our product. The developer does not specify what he wants to use Cuda for; rather the library chooses the best way to perform the calculation, be that in real time or using more GPU or more CPU,’ he
says. VSG is able to ensure that its products make full use of even the latest incarnations of Nvidia’s hardware and Cuda platform by virtue of the fact that it is a beta tester for the devices: ‘We get the latest generation before they hit the market, so that we can test them and report any suggestions and wishes we have back to Nvidia,’ says Billy. As well as having been early adopters of the Cuda GPU programming environment, VSG is an early user of Nvidia’s CompleX application acceleration engine – a scalability tool that allows a large 3D volume to be split into a number of smaller parts to be distributed across however many GPU boards a user has attached to his or her system. CompleX is linked to Nvidia’s Quadro Plex products, which are high performance visualisation-oriented single workstations containing two, four, or eight GPU cards. ‘Thanks to the CompleX technology, the display can be four, eight, or 16 times faster,’ explains Billy. ‘It allows the calculations on a very large volume to be distributed [across several GPUs], essentially in real time. We are able to increase the frame-rate and the display speed by increasing the number of GPUs.’
Beyond display
A GPU (or several) is an essential piece of equipment for the visualisation side of the process, but the GPU may not always be a good choice when it comes
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SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD JUNE/JULY 2010
www.scientifi
c-computing.com
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