NSF Award
1042250
This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will investigate the feasibility of a<br/>high-performance FPGA implementation of full 3-D seismic Waveform Inversion (WFI), the<br/>most advanced and resource-demanding seismic imaging application used today in the oil and gas<br/>industry. The objective of WFI is to estimate a model of the Earth?s subsurface that minimizes<br/>the difference between recorded data and synthetic simulated data derived from an iteratively<br/>adjusted Earth model. The computational kernel of WFI is the 3-D wave equation in a<br/>heterogeneous medium. This equation is solved repeatedly in a gradient optimization process<br/>yielding highly accurate seismic images. The deliverable of the Phase I project will be a novel<br/>Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementation of an especially optimized WFI kernel<br/>in the form of a socket compliant special-purpose device. In a continuation Phase II project, the<br/>Phase I deliverable will be evolved into a prototype full-fledged implementation of WFI,<br/>delivering order-of-magnitudes improvements in performance over conventional software<br/>implementations on traditional hardware. As microprocessors reach the limits of attainable clock<br/>frequencies and power consumption, there is a growing need in the oil and gas industry to go<br/>beyond conventional computer software/hardware solutions. The proposed project addresses this<br/>need.<br/><br/>The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to usher in a new era of low impact,<br/>low energy, and much higher-performance computing in the oil and gas industry. FPGA<br/>computing is likely to become a disruptive technology for geophysical exploration, allowing<br/>unprecedented improvements in capability and performance. With the proposed technology, 3-D<br/>seismic data will be processed faster, and used more effectively to characterize and delineate oil<br/>and gas reservoirs in extremely complicated geological settings. Furthermore, the proposed<br/>technology will enable WFI in production settings. The urgent need for this new capability is<br/>highlighted by domestic and foreign oil companies' recent announcements that their main<br/>technological focus and critical requirements are for increasingly challenging environments. In<br/>this context, the accurate, higher resolution, and faster seismic imaging enabled by FPGAs will<br/>have economic impact by: (1) improving the odds of finding new deposits of oil and gas, (2)<br/>reducing extraction and development costs by providing higher imaging accuracy, (3) increasing<br/>the amount of hydrocarbons recovered, augmenting the national oil and gas reserves, reducing<br/>dependence on foreign oil, and benefiting the U.S. economy.
