J. Daniel Janzen, NVIDIA
Once upon a time, oil exploration could be as simple as a geologist’s trained eye recognizing telltale bumps in the surrounding landscape. Since then, more than a century of large-scale production and intensifying competition have forced oil and gas companies to look harder and harder to find promising deposits. The two basic requirements of exploration, however, remain unchanged: survey data quality and the ability to interpret it meaningfully.
Successes and challenges
The oil and gas industry has never had so much data to work with as it does today. Recent technological advances have made it possible to achieve higher resolution survey data, while the size of the areas measured also has increased. As higher oil prices make it economical to pursue reserves that are harder to reach, oil and gas companies are re-sampling previously explored fields at higher resolution to discover deposits that may have been missed. And they are collecting data over time in fields under production to determine how most effectively to produce the reservoir. New seismic tools and real-time imaging software offer the potential to greatly increase available global reserves.
While data is flowing as never before, with survey sets of 100 gigabytes (GB) are more commonplace, the ability to make sense of the data has lagged.
Wytch Farm and the Wytch Farm data set provided by BP Exploration and its partner companies, Premier Oil Plc., Anadarko Petroleum Corp., ONEPM Ltd., Talisman North Sea Ltd. (Image courtesy Landmark.)
Because the vast amounts of data being gathered make empirical analysis virtually impossible, geologists and geophysicists rely heavily on data visualization to spot evidence of promising reserves. The limited graphics processing power of contemporary visualization systems has proven to be a critical constraint, making it impossible to visualize an entire regional data set at high resolution in a single view.
Instead, industry has worked with subsets of the available data (which can obscure larger trends) or has settled for lower resolution screens that can misrepresent an area’s true potential.
The tradeoff between detail and context limits the amount of data that can be explored and the scenarios that can be evaluated, hampering the effectiveness of a company’s computer assisted exploration efforts.
More effective visualization systems are coming into view. The latest innovations have made it possible to visualize and interpret large data set at the highest possible resolution without losing context to unlock their full potential for identifying subsurface circumstances. As a result, detailed multi- attribute analysis can be done with extreme precision, while retaining the full context needed to identify large-scale trends.
Big picture, fine details
Companies like Landmark, Paradigm, and Schlumberger are introducing a new breed of visualization systems with the graphics processing power to handle even the largest data set without compromising on context or detail. One such system, a Landmark solution incorporating a Verari Systems E&P 7500 visualization server and Landmark GeoProbe software, can drive powerful displays such as the Sony SXRD 4K projector, with a resolution of 8 million pixels - four times the resolution of a standard HDTV projector - as well as the highest-resolution LCD monitors available. By enabling higher resolution on larger screens, the system provides a wider field of view while maintaining the details necessary for more exact interpretation of an exploration prospect.
The Landmark visualization system can visualize and interpret 45,000 sq km (17,375 sq mi) of 3D seismic data drawn from more than 100 3D surveys. Instead of parsing the data for display on a standard monitor, the system can present the full detail of the data on a high-resolution 56-in. (142-cm) LCD desktop display. Designed specifically to enable interactive interpretation using multi-attribute and multi-volume seismic data, well data, and reservoir models, the system enables drilling deep into data sets while maintaining a view of the big picture.
The relatively low cost of the Landmark solution makes it possible for oil and gas companies to rethink the way they deploy visualization capabilities within their organizations. While the cost of a high-end display system remains significant for the time being, in principle, enough graphics processing power can be added to a given workstation to support a large number of projectors and a correspondingly higher number of pixels. By providing high resolution visualization in a team room or collaboration room scenario, companies can avoid the need to schedule time in a shared visualization center. The system also can enable other applications, such as asset team software tools used to create field development plans to run in a high-resolution display environment.
Graphics breakthrough
Built to handle demanding industrial applications, the Landmark visualization system comes with plenty of horsepower, powered by up to eight AMD Opteron processors and 128 GB of memory. But the system’s key innovation lies in its graphics technology, which uses a unique approach to overcome the physical constraints that have limited the graphics processing power of traditional visualization systems.
The Quadro Plex GPU uses parallel rather than serial processing to speed computations.
As a data set grows larger, the visualization system requires greater graphics processing power to translate its full depth and detail into pixels on a screen. As graphics cards get more powerful, they consume more space and power and generate more heat. Furthermore, they are constrained by the physical capacity of the server or workstation within which they are installed.
The NVIDIA Quadro Plex 1000 visual computing system changes this picture. Housed in a standalone chassis rather than inside the workstation or server, the Quadro Plex allows power, space, and heat to be managed more effectively. Plugged into existing PCs, workstations, or servers, the system acts as a supercharged graphics card to deliver the scalability needed for large-scale, high-definition visualization. Instead of being limited to two graphics cards, a single workstation can now draw on four to eight high-end cards, dramatically increasing pixel processing power. This broad configurability enables the development of server-based solutions that incorporate multiple processors and memory modules to deliver super high-end performance and drive a large number of projectors at high resolution.
As part of a high-end visualization system, NVIDIA says, the Quadro Plex delivers a 20X increase in density compared to traditional graphics processing solutions. By delivering rendering power of up to 80 billion pixels per second and 7 billion vertices per second, with resolutions as high as 148 megapixels on 16 synchronized digital-output channels or eight HD SDI channels, the Quadro Plex can be configured as a single system or added to a visualization cluster for scalability. A unified architecture dynamically allocates compute, geometry, shading, and pixel processing power to optimize performance.
While the most immediate application of the Quadro Plex for oil and gas exploration is in large-scale visualization centers, it also allows display channels from multiple workstations to be combined into one large “virtual display,” opening new possibilities for the way visualization technology can be deployed within an organization. As an external graphics system, the Quadro Plex can be applied to a number of different workstations or installed within a server room to scale up back-end rendering.
Visualization center and beyond
The computing capabilities of the GPU (graphics processing unit) system make it possible to harness some of that processing power for general-purpose computing applications in addition to image processing. The inherently parallel nature of the algorithms for seismic processing and other oil and gas industry tasks are well suited to NVIDIA’s specialized computing architecture. Landmark’s GeoProbe product takes advantage of the graphics processing capability of the GPU, using custom GPU shaders to implement advanced features. NVIDIA’s Compute Unified Device Architecture software environment gives programmers direct access to the multi-threaded GPU, its native instruction set, memory, and massive parallelization through a standard C-Compiler. This capability gives geologists and geophysicists the power to address a broad range of complex, data-intensive challenges.
Moving forward, independent software vendors will begin to leverage the technology and capabilities of the Quadro Plex GPU for real-time analysis to introduce new functionality based on calculations that were previously too time consuming to be realistic, NVIDIA predicts.
The shift from a traditional computing architecture to high-performance GPUs can fundamentally change workflow by speeding some operations by one or two orders of magnitude. Processes that once took 10 minutes could potentially be completed in one minute. A shorter cycle time means more scenarios and more thorough data exploration than previously possible. By narrowing the gap between today’s super-sized data sets and the capability of exploration personnel to interpret them meaningfully, the new breed of visualization systems offer oil and gas companies the ability to make better decisions faster. It’s not quite as simple as spotting bumps in the landscape - but with prices and competition at historic levels, the resulting wells may be just as profitable.
J. Daniel Janzen is a writer in Brooklyn, New York, focusing on industry and technology trends.
