HPC for oil and gas


had a lot of experience with the Lustre file system and of getting higher bandwidth out of the storage units to get data in and out.’ Bull has been discussing with its customers what their through-put expectations are, and how applications would run on a GPU or other form of accelerator architecture. ‘Te idea is to say: well, based on the data sample that you have given us, we can do a proof of concept and tell you what the speed-up would be.’ Gueritz did not see that porting legacy code


across to hybrid architectures presented too much of a problem. ‘Tere has always been a need to keep programs up to date. Everyone accepts that some kind of many-core or multicore approach is needed, regardless of the specific technologies that are appearing. Bull does have a lot of parallel programming expertise in-house. Application programmers are geoscientists first and parallel programmers second. Our perspective is to get applications to perform as best they can.’ Te human factor was taken up also by


Vincent Natoli, chief executive of Stone Ridge Technology: ‘15 years ago it was not ridiculous to hire a geophysicist, put him in a room and get him to write code. Nowadays, it has to be parallel code and the physics is more complex.’ He too saw a requirement for two different skills – the skill to map the equations to a modern computing environment is completely different from understanding how those governing equations are derived. ‘We are the guys that fit in the middle. We love the science. We have physicists and applied mathematicians who are also passionate about the computing.’ Stone Ridge has been working as a consultant for the oil and gas industry, providing expertise in this combination of science and soſtware optimisation, for more than seven years. It has helped its customers develop production codes – including Reverse Time Migration; Kirchhoff Time Migration; and Reservoir Simulation – for CPU and GPUs. In Natoli’s view, the oil industry has ‘a


queue of stuff waiting till the hardware is ready. Tey already know what they want to do at exascale’. And it is clear to Natoli that in HPC ‘parallelism is going to be everything. It’s not going to get easier to map to the highly parallel computational architectures Tere is going to be an increasing division of labour between the domain scientists and the people working closely with them to map it to parallel compute architectures. It’s an exciting field,’ he said. For Philip Neri, vice president of Marketing


and Product Strategy at Terraspark, the focus is also on the human factor. But his interest is in the final stages – the interpretation – aſter most of the highly-intensive computing has been done. ‘Where the pinch comes is with the


22 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD


Staff from the Brazilian oil company Petrobras celebrate the first oil to be produced from beneath a salt dome, at the Lula oil field (originally the Tupi oil field) 250km off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Such ‘pre-salt’ deposits have effectively doubled estimates of the country’s oil reserves


geologist or geophysicist, who has to interpret this information on an every tighter schedule,’ he said. With exploration licences granted only for about three years, this leaves little time to get the boat and other survey equipment into place and then do the drilling to validate the results. ‘Te man in the middle is this interpreter, who has the avalanche of data and is oſten working on a deskside computer. By the nature of this industry, there is a need for more accurate work on more complex geology. Tere has not been an increase in compute power for this relatively small group of geoscientists. Tese people are pressured by the drilling schedule. Tere is more stress in that critical link than there is at the processing end.’ Most of the soſtware is geared to the


visualisation of the data, he continued. Tere are good data cards and expensive displays. Te soſtware offers ‘lots of possibilities to colour data and zoom it, but the computer is not being used as a computer to calculate things. What is lacking is help for the geologists to gain more insight quicker into the data rather than looking at it with their eyes and trying to infer insight into the geological model.’ Terraspark has been concentrating, therefore, on accelerating the interpretation process and relieving the operator of a lot of menial tasks to free up time for analysis and comparison. Teir approach is to divide


the workflow into four steps: ‘We try and remove areas of no data from the interpretation – salt bodies or areas of no reflection. We have automated methods to “shrinkwrap” a


salt dome very quickly to take it out of any further activity. Secondly, our signature product automatically extracts all the faults.’ Te soſtware enhances the discontinuities within the data column so that the process of building fault planes is easier. ‘It now takes a couple of days of work to perform what would previously have taken a month or two,’ he said. Te next step is to identify the major


horizons or geological levels. Te final stage – which Terraspark has patented – is to transform the data into its paleo-depositional environment. ‘It’s very hard to see geological features when everything has been disrupted by the history of tectonic movement since they were deposited. We basically unfold everything and bring it back to the status it was in when it was deposited. Tis is very compute intensive; removing hundreds of millions of years of folding and mountain creation.’ Neri does not see a need for expensive


Further information


Bull www.bull.co.uk


Limit Point Systems www.limitpt.com


Nvidia www.nvidia.com


Maxeler Technologies www.maxeler.com


compute clusters at this stage but looks to GPUs to provide the computational power. It means of course that the code has to be ported to GPUs but ‘we did not find the rewrite to be too onerous. We are making the compute- intensive parts run on the GPU, not the whole code.’ He reports that the shiſt can accelerate performance by a factor of 10 to 15, generally. In oil and gas, GPUs are


Stone Ridge Technology www.stoneridge technology.com


Terraspark www.terraspark.com


here to stay, according to Stone Ridge’s Natoli: ‘It is remarkable what Nvidia has done in just two or three years – they have made themselves an essential part of the compute technology in a major industry.’


www.scientific-computing.com


Petrobras


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