2017 Oil & Gas HPC Conference

PRESENTATION NOT AVAILABLE

3D seismic images underpin almost all geoscience interpretation/analysis for upstream opportunity generation in the upstream oil and gas industry. Full Waveform Inversion (FWI), is a highly compute intensive emerging technology to create images and models of the subsurface.
FWI utilizes the seismic wave propagation equation (up to full physics) in to simulate seismic field records (forward model), based on an initial representation 3D model of geophysical parameters of the subsurface.  FWI iteratively updates the geophysical parameter 3D model to improve the match between the actual field data and simulated data to a user specified level (inversion).
The compute costs and time required to apply FWI can be a limitation to use.    Optimization, of many components of the full system including hardware, software, project selection, level of physics can lower these barriers.
This talk discusses the challenges FWI creates for modern high performance computing systems and possible approaches to full system optimization in order to lower compute costs and improve cycle time.