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Implementation of Forward Wave Migration Algorithm for Oil Exploration Achieves 16x Performance Improvement: Celoxica, a leader in electronic system level design for the acceleration of embedded systems and high-performance computing, is demonstrating the acceleration of compute intensive oil exploration applications at Supercomputing 06 (Booth 500). The real-time demonstration shows massive performance acceleration using a combination of FPGA based co-processors, high-speed interconnect and Celoxica’s enabling design tools and IP. The demonstrated algorithm performs finite difference acoustic modelling for a seismic application. Using Celoxica’s DK Design Suite, the algorithm is off-loaded from the main processor and compiled from C software code to an FPGA based parallel co-processor. The demonstration compares the performance of the algorithm on a stand-alone processor and an FPGA co-processor. In this example the Celoxica architected solution was implemented into a Xilinx Virtex 4 FPGA and achieved a 16x performance improvement on an algorithm provided by Total, one of the largest oil companies in the world. "We believe that FPGA technology will allow us to achieve much greater performance levels than are possible with processor-only based systems," said Laurent Derrien, high-performance computing (HPC) team, Total. "Initial results have been very promising, and with our partner Celoxica, we are looking forward to continued progress in the area of accelerated computing," said Henri Calandra, HPC Team, Total. "This benchmark is the latest data point that shows the capabilities of modern FPGA co-processors for high-performance computing applications," said Jeff Jussel, vice president of marketing and general manager of the Americas for Celoxica. "The ability to program FPGAs from software throws open the door for application acceleration in the oil and gas industry, as well as for applications in other compute intensive industries such as finance and the life sciences." Celoxica recently released the RCHTX card that provides the acceleration platform for FPGA-based co-processing. Celoxica provides a complete solution from software compilation, RTOS kernels for FPGA computing as well as their signature compilers that take C software applications and compile them to FPGA hardware.