HPC for oil and gas


Accelerating the search for oil


Oil companies are turning to acclerators, such as GPUs and FPGAs, to process data and speed up simulations.


Tom Wilkie reports


in the mid-1990s, only about 40 per cent of oil deposits fulfilled the company’s expectations. More than a decade on, that figure is pushing up beyond 70 per cent. Te improvement, he said, was due to better modelling and simulation using high-performance computing. If HPC-based simulation avoids Total drilling a single dry well, then it would save the company around $80M or more, he added. Tree factors affect the computational


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workload in the oil and gas industry. Firstly, the amount of data being acquired for analysis is growing rapidly. Seismic data sets, which represent the majority of the data being acquired, are getting bigger and bigger. In the search for oil under the seabed, exploration companies are moving from having just one ship that trails a few streamers behind it, to wide-azimuth scans where many vessels trail many streamers, each of which has many sensors. Te aim is to generate more data to provide superior illumination of the subsurface. Te other side of the computational


workload is that geoscientists can choose how complex a model they’re going to use. One of the most popular, ray tracing, is relatively quick nowadays, but there are other algorithms that can take weeks to run. For example, the oil in the Gulf of Mexico is ‘hidden’ below salt domes which are difficult to map and the geology of the Gulf is very complex. Tus a lot of the exploration in the Gulf of Mexico uses relatively complex anisotropic physics models employing reverse time migration, a complex, 3-stage, full-wave simulation model, to ‘look’ under the salt structures and find the oil. An added complication is that salt bends and twists itself into complicated shapes where there are useful places to look for oil.


www.scientific-computing.com


t the recent International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Philippe Ricoux from French oil company Total noted that,


An artist’s impression of oil extraction from pre-salt deposits AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2012 19


Petrobras


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