APPLICATIONS

NVIDIA Tesla and CUDA Technologies Transform the Oil and Gas Industry: Houston-based SeismicCity announced today that it is using NVIDIA Tesla S1070 1U systems for Reverse Time Migration (RTM) -- one of the most advanced seismic imaging techniques ever used by the oil and gas industry. SeismicCity selected the NVIDIA Tesla S1070 as it offered the fastest and most scalable implementation to run these complex algorithms enabling discovery of new oil and gas reserves faster. "Last year, SeismicCity migrated its depth imaging system from a 1,000- core CPU based configuration to a configuration based on NVIDIA Tesla 1U systems," said Claude Pignol, vice president of technology at SeismicCity. "NVIDIA's advancements in GPU Computing are a major breakthrough. Transitioning to GPUs has given us a 10-20X performance boost, but more importantly, GPUs allow us to use computationally-intensive algorithms that we simply couldn't process with CPUs. This is a huge advancement which allows us to use RTM and other more accurate but data-intensive algorithms for larger datasets." Speaking to the scalability of NVIDIA Tesla, Fatmir Hoxha, vice president of research and development at SeismicCity said, "We've measured automatic performance gains by switching from the Tesla S870 1U to the new Tesla S1070 1U systems due to the increase in cores and the larger device memory provided in the latest generation Tesla 10-series systems. This was without a single modification to the CUDA-based software. We have never seen seamless performance gains without re-coding and re-optimization." With an increased need to boost domestic U.S. oil production coupled with a tenfold increase in seismic datasets in the last 3 years, there has never been a more important time for the oil and gas industry to explore new ways of discovering new reserves. NVIDIA is the first to market with production implementations of GPU-based accelerators that enable specialized seismic processing; tasks that are resource-prohibitive on CPU-based clusters. Each Tesla 10-series processor has 240 cores, providing 1 Teraflop of processing power, along with 4GB of onboard memory. The new NVIDIA Tesla S1070 1U system features four Tesla 10-series processors -- for a total of 960 cores and 4 Teraflops of processing power. NVIDIA Tesla S1070 1U systems are available today from resellers all over the world -- for a full listing please visit: its Web site.