NVIDIA Tesla to Improve Search for Oil and Gas

Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA and GeoStar, a leading Chinese geophysical service provider, have jointly announced the launch of a new hardware and software solution that is meant to significantly boost the performance of the seismic computation for oil and gas companies in China. The solution will take advantage of NVIDIA's Tesla graphics processing unit, which is expected to significantly increase the performance of GeoStar's seismic software suite, when rendering complex seismic data. Thanks to the impressive processing power of the Tesla GPU, the performance of the software application is dramatically increased, when compared with that achieved by CPU-based clusters.

“We are dealing with large prestack time migration datasets, which typically take more than 30 hours to run on a cluster of 66 CPUs,” Liu Qin, general manager of GeoStar, said. “Just a single Tesla C1060 GPU delivers roughly the same computing power, which means we can get orders of magnitude performance increases as we add more GPUs, while dramatically saving power and cost. Tesla GPUs are truly a revolutionary solution for oil and gas exploration.”

The announcement is just another step in NVIDIA's plan to demonstrate the immense computational power of the graphics processing unit to handle the computation of large datasets. In this case, the combination between NVIDIA's Tesla GPUs and GeoStar's seismic computation application will enable oil and gas companies in China to search the earth for oil deposits, in a faster and more affordable way. In addition to the performance potential of the Tesla GPU, GeoStar's application will also take advantage of NVIDIA's CUDA technology.

NVIDIA has been promoting its Tesla GPUs and the CUDA technology for a while now, as an alternative to the CPU-based supercomputers. Thanks to the parallel CUDA architecture, these GPUs are capable of delivering an immense performance for a wide range of different applications, beyond graphics.