ABSTRACT

3D voxel-volume visualization and interpretation have been used in the oil and gas industry for approximately 20 years. Their longevity demonstrates the power of this technology to perform investigations directly within the seismic data in order to highlight structural patterns, depositional features and attribute anomalies, possibly associated with fluid effects.  Dramatic increases in the size of available seismic information, in conjunction with the complexity of geological environments, have resulted in modest changes in voxel technology over the past years.  One of the remaining challenges is the adaption of these applications to take advantage of the high compute capacity available on the desktop today.
 
Recently, the gaming industry has driven the development of very powerful graphic cards that are now being used as computing devices (GPUs) for highly parallelized processes. The seismic processing segment of the geoscience industry was the first to leverage this improved architecture, and to adapt some of their compute-intensive processes (e.g. migrations) for use with these graphic cards.  For 3D volume visualization applications, these GPUs represent a unique opportunity to solve the issues of both lag and rendering (which often results in visual artifacts), by bringing the seismic data onto the GPU itself.  Harnessing the accelerating growth in compute power of GPUs extends the interpretation process by enabling on-the-fly, volume-based, seismic attribute processing and multi-horizon flattening. 
 
This presentation will feature interactive processing via GPU utilization for prospect analysis.  The new voxel visualization GPU-based window will demonstrate a breakthrough in rendering quality in both conventional and unconventional plays. 

For more information, please contact:  Alexandra.Jordan@pdgm.com