INDUSTRY

Silicon Graphics, a global leader in high-performance computing, storage and advanced visualization, and Landmark Graphics, a wholly owned business unit of Halliburton, have demonstrated breakthrough technology with the use of advanced interactive visualization on a 400GB seismic dataset in association with Marathon Oil Company. This new practical science solution enables exploration of the Earth's subsurface using seismic information that contains four times more information than current technologies. By giving geoscientists rapid and easy access to such massive data sets, they will be able to compose the kind of key insights that will assist in locating additional oil deposits, extracting more oil from existing reservoirs, and do so at a lower cost. This breakthrough was achieved using a Silicon Graphics Onyx4 visualization system with 64 processors, 4 graphics processing units (GPUs), 512GB system memory and running the GeoProbe 64-bit application from Landmark Graphics. The seismic data visualized was 400GB in size, shattering the previous world record of less than 100GB, set on a Silicon Graphics(R) Onyx 3000 system. This data set is hundreds of times larger than those viewed on typical PC solutions, which are usually less than two gigabytes in size. This ability to visualize increased data sizes enables a greater regional area to be investigated, highlighting large scale trends. These trends can be easily missed when having to view identical data broken into multiple smaller-sized subsets. This technology also enables more details to be seen in a given area, and even more importantly, supports new techniques using additional rock and fluid properties, giving a fresh and unique perspective into the details of underground rock formations. Previous techniques have been forced to compromise the use of these properties due to data size limitations. The overall result is more accurate reservoir characterization, offering the potential to increase the amount of oil and gas recovered while at the same time lowering the cost of extraction by reducing the number of wells drilled. Marathon has utilized SGI's visualization systems to provide substantial value to geoscience interpretation for nearly a decade. "Marathon has many very large datasets used to characterize complex reservoirs and currently geoscientists are limited in the amount of data they can visualize at one time," said Sharon Crawford, Supervisor, Computer-Aided Interpretation at Marathon. "The ability to visualize multiple attributes over an entire area will give a better understanding of the overall picture, resulting in better, faster exploration and development decisions with lower risk." The location of oil and gas reserves are estimated by sending sound waves into the earth and listening for very faint echoes off of underground rocks. Visualizing this seismic data allows geoscientists to see underground and to model the location, shape and distribution of suspected oil reservoirs. SGI's latest visualization systems afford scientists the opportunity to look at these locations and examine multiple characteristics with a significantly broader perspective, in far greater detail and in a much shorter time than previously possible. "SGI is delighted that Marathon is leveraging the power of our scalable visual computing systems to deliver results critical to meetings today's challenges in the energy field," said Paul McNamara, Visual Systems Group general manager and senior vice president, SGI. "Since this system allows Marathon to incorporate significantly more seismic data than previously thought possible, they are able to see vastly more subsurface details and view the oil field in total. This 'whole picture' view will transform the process of oil exploration, reducing cost, improving accuracy, and providing for more ecologically sensitive oil field development." "As the pursuit for finding and producing hydrocarbons moves into more geologically complex environments, new technologies such as GeoProbe are necessary to push back the boundaries and help sustain the world's energy needs," said Jon Lewis, vice president, Innovation and Marketing, Landmark Graphics. "Landmark's GeoProbe leads the industry in volume interpretation and is the only system capable of meeting these challenging demands. GeoProbe leverages all the available processors and graphics cards on the SGI system to achieve scalability and performance on large datasets." SGI is a leader in technologies that allow oil and gas companies around the world to analyze geoscience and engineering data in highly visual, three-dimensional formats for exploration and development of hydrocarbon reservoirs. Increasingly, data is viewed simultaneously and collaboratively by multidisciplinary teams dispersed in locations around the world. Combining high performance computing and data management technologies with advanced collaborative visualization capabilities allows geoscientists, engineers and researchers to gain new insight through analysis of critical data in innovative and cost-saving ways.