SCIENCE

DRC Computer Corporation has announced that it has been awarded a National Science Foundation phase I award to develop a FPGA-accelerated 3-D Waveform Inversion technology to be used for Geophysical Exploration.

"The challenge of geophysical exploration has pushed the boundary for computational power such that new methods are being required to keep up with the complexity of deep well exploration. Having the power of accelerated 3-D waveform inversion will be essential going forward,"says Dr. Sergio Zarantonello, CEO of Algorithmica LLC, a firm specializing in computational mathematics for the earth sciences that will assist DRC on this project.

Using this new 3-D Waveform technique geophysicists will be able to more accurately survey deep oil well fields. The 3-D Waveform Inversion will be implemented on the advanced DRC Accelium accelerators. These devices are being used to accelerate complex routines and algorithms providing acceleration levels of ten and one hundred times the performance of x86 CPUs. Used by many commercial, research and government organizations in a broad range of applications including energy, genomics, data security, image analysis, predictive weather analysis, cryptologics, data mining, forensics and deep packet inspection.

"DRC continues to push the boundary of accelerator based applications. This award recognizes the potential of the DRC technology in improving the cost of energy exploration," commented Larry Laurich, DRC President and Principle Investigator, adding "In addition the very low energy consumption of the DRC Accelium accelerator coupled with very high performance provides a very green solution."