Seismic imaging on massively parallel computers

Conference · Fri Mar 01 04:00:00 EST 1996

OSTI ID:221931

Ober, C C; Oldfield, R; Womble, D E; VanDyke, J; Dosanjh, S

Fast, accurate imaging of complex, oil-bearing geologies, such as overthrusts and salt domes, is the key to reducing the costs of domestic oil and gas exploration. Geophysicists say that the known oil reserves in the Gulf of Mexico could be significantly increased if accurate seismic imaging beneath salt domes was possible. A range of techniques exist for imaging these regions, but the highly accurate techniques involve the solution of the wave equation and are characterized by large data sets and large computational demands. Massively parallel computers can provide the computational power for these highly accurate imaging techniques. A brief introduction to seismic processing will be presented, and the implementation of a seismic-imaging code for distributed memory computers will be discussed. The portable code, Salvo, performs a wave equation-based, 3-D, prestack, depth imaging and currently runs on the Intel Paragon and the Cray T3D. It used MPI for portability, and has sustained 22 Mflops/sec/proc (compiled FORTRAN) on the Intel Paragon.

• Research Organization: Sandia National Labs., Albuquerque, NM (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
• DOE Contract Number: AC04-94AL85000
• OSTI ID: 221931
• Report Number(s): SAND--96-0691C; CONF-960482--2; ON: DE96006995
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

02 PETROLEUM
03 NATURAL GAS
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
EXPLORATION
GEOPHYSICAL SURVEYS
IMAGE PROCESSING
NATURAL GAS
PARALLEL PROCESSING
PETROLEUM
S CODES
SALT DEPOSITS
SEISMIC SURVEYS
WAVE EQUATIONS