ACADEMIA

NVIDIA announced availability of the NVIDIA Tesla K10 GPU accelerator, designed to address the most difficult challenges in two high-performance computing (HPC) markets: seismic data processing in oil and gas exploration, and signal and image processing in the defense industry.

The Tesla K10 is based on the new NVIDIA Kepler computing architecture, the fastest, most efficient, highest-performance computing architecture ever built.

The Kepler architecture enables two high-performance Tesla K10 GPUs to be placed on a single accelerator board. Delivering an aggregate performance of 4.58 teraflops of single-precision floating point and 320 gigabytes per second memory bandwidth, the Tesla K10 is the world's highest throughput GPU accelerator.

The Tesla K10 GPU was introduced at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC), as part of a series of announcements from NVIDIA, all of which can be accessed in the GTC online press room.

Seismic Data Processing -- Oil and Gas Seismic processing uses large data centers to crunch through petabytes of information about the Earth's subsurface area, generated from reflected seismic waves. Geophysicists analyze the resulting 2D and 3D images to discover oil and gas deposits, and to determine the best and safest locations to drill.

NVIDIA GPUs improve the accuracy of seismic processing by enabling the use of more detailed, computationally intensive seismic processing software algorithms such as reverse time migration, full waveform inversion and Kirchoff time / depth migration.

Leading seismic processing companies -- including Schlumberger, CGGVeritas, and TGS -- and oil and gas companies -- such as Chevron, Petrobras, Total, ENI, Repsol and Saudi Aramco -- are using GPUs to dramatically increase their success rate in the identification of new reserves. By generating higher-quality images in a more affordable and timely fashion, GPUs give these companies a much greater degree of accuracy and confidence in drilling decisions.

"The Tesla K10 is simply amazing," said Paulo Souza, developer in the Geophysical Technology Group at Petrobras RTM. "My seismic application is 1.8x faster on the K10, compared with the Tesla M2090 GPU within the same power envelope. This transformational technology will dramatically accelerate our ability to find and safely reach new oil and gas reserves, as 90 percent of our computational power comes from the GPUs."

Signal and Image Processing -- Defense The NVIDIA Tesla K10 GPU can help agencies increase national security by improving the quality, and speeding the delivery of, actionable video analytics and image forensics to security and law-enforcement officials. GPUs speed up by as much as 100x the process of analyzing thousands of video feeds generated by security cameras and drones, enabling analysts to better identify events and individuals of interest.

"The massive amount of video data being generated from security cameras and UAVs presents a 'new big data' problem for the defense industry," said Yiannis Antoniades, director of ISR Technology at BAE Systems. "We now have broad access to robust, high-quality video, but often we cannot analyze it quickly enough to generate actionable intelligence. GPUs are being used to accelerate nearly every aspect of video analytics, from video stabilization to orthorectification, enabling us to provide real, valuable data to the field quicker than ever before."