BIG DATA

ModViz, leading provider of 3D graphics acceleration software, announced today that ConocoPhillips has become the second major international oil company to purchase its Virtual Graphics Platform (VGP) software. VGP delivers supercomputing-level 3D visualization to the geoscientist's desktop, providing oil companies with impressive productivity gains in the analysis of large volumes of 3D exploration and production (E&P) data. ModViz developed VGP graphics acceleration software to enable geoscientists to have virtually unlimited access to 3D graphics processing power for high-performance, scalable 3D visualization of large seismic datasets on a single multi-GPU workstation or across a cluster of multiple workstations. Oil companies equipped with VGP can expect dramatic improvements in the speed, quality, and cost of analysis and interpretation of vital E&P data needed for rapid evaluation of hydrocarbons prospects and producing reservoirs. ConocoPhillips has so far purchased two VGP software licenses from ModViz and intends to continue evaluating the technology at its Houston-based Technical Computing Environment. Last November Shell's International Exploration and Production division in Houston became ModViz's first major oil customer for its VGP software, following two years of intensive evaluation and testing. "ConocoPhillips' license of VGP is our most current example of how we are helping geophysicists and engineers shorten their interpretation workflow by removing the graphics processing bottleneck and allowing access to much larger surface and volume data," said Tom Coull, CEO of ModViz. "These newest VGP users are now able to analyze data sets in real time that were previously either impossible or had traditionally taken hours or days." Coull notes that the graphic processing demands for E&P data are very challenging, and that computing clusters are only now making their way into the graphics arena. "We have been able to configure the hardware for multiple graphic processor units (GPUs) in a single workstation or clustered implementation. The significance of VGP is that it can speed up any OpenGL-based application harnessing all the available graphics horsepower. That's something no one else has been able to do, and means a step change in the visualization performance that companies can expect in the future."