OREANDA-NEWS. August 10, 2016. To all of the doodlebuggers, geologists, geophysicists, engineers and exploration IT folks out there, I have a question for you — well, maybe a few.  Is your compute and exploration application environment ready for exascale? Are you ready for seismic surveys that are multisource, multi-azimuth, with thousands of sensors, and 500 TB to 1 PB in size? Are your new spectral algorithms capable of functioning in your current environment without breaking the system architecture? These are the questions you should be asking yourself right now.

As an avid watcher and participant in the exploration industry, the barometers I use to determine where the industry is headed are the exploration service companies and industry ISVs. Both Halliburton and Schlumberger, while reporting on their 2016 Q2 financials, have stated that we have seen the last of the downturn and are looking forward to a semiprofitable end to 2016 and a profitable 2017. Why does that matter? It matters because we are just now beginning to see a turnaround in pent-up demand for exploration infrastructure. New surveys are being shot, leases are now being gobbled up, the largest Gulf of Mexico lease sale is just on the horizon, and a number of field crews are being put back to work. This is the backbone of our industry. Two years of functioning at “good enough” has allowed application, algorithm and field survey developments to overrun our currently available capacity and capability in computing infrastructure. And from what I’m  seeing in new seismic field survey design and the quantity of data coming from the field, we are in for a surprise larger than when we tried to run our first 3-D seismic survey on a TIMAP II back in the early ’80s.

This is why Cray decided to collaborate with Landmark in qualifying SeisSpace® ProMAX® on a Cray infrastructure. We certainly do not have all the answers, at least not yet, but Cray’s experience in high performance computing, application profiling, storage optimization and performance tuning, combined with Landmark’s industry and application expertise, is a pretty good start.

On June 1, 2016, Cray and Landmark embarked on a joint project to simply qualify SeisSpace ProMAX on a Cray® CS400™ cluster supercomputer. Our idea was to provide current and future Landmark customers with compute and storage infrastructure options that allow massive scaling for the most complex of seismic surveys today and in the future. What we got out of the project was so much more.

The CS400 system we used is not Cray’s highest-performance system. It is the system that best mimics the current clustered architectures being used in the industry today, and gives us an excellent base line to begin as we continue to move SeisSpace ProMAX up the performance curve. We completed the successful qualification in less than three weeks. Cray is now a recommended option for your SeisSpace environment. What we also learned is that with very little tweaking of the application stack (none, actually, to start with) we were able to show a minimum of 50 percent improvement all the way to a 9x improvement in application runtime reductions depending on the modules used and the systems we used for comparison.

Mind you, this was not meant to be a benchmark; we merely ran performance and threshold tests to see if the system was performing as expected. We were very surprised. As a matter of fact, We were very surprised so we reran the tests three more times for validation. I will have the full details at the Cray booth at Landmark’s Innovation Forum & Exposition.

We’re not going to stop here. We will continue to look for ways to improve infrastructure and application performance for the Landmark environment. Our next steps with SeisSpace ProMAX will be to see how it runs on a monster XC40™ system with the Aries™ interconnect. I can seriously see some massive improvement in scale and performance with this test. We will also be working closely with Landmark on application tweaks to take advantage of Cray software and hardware technology.

Come by the Cray booth at the Landmark Innovation Forum & Exposition and ask for Dennis, Bert or Frank, and we can talk more about where we are headed in energy exploration technology.