Energy exploration is a highly competitive market. The ability to run more complex reservoir simulations in order to more accurately determine the best methods for drilling is a critical part of the exploration process. This white paper discusses how a high performance storage solution can increase the performance of reservoir simulations and seismic modelling.
Both CPU processing power and the ability to quickly store and retrieve massive amounts of seismic data contribute to the overall performance of such a system. While most processing power from various vendors will be quite similar, storage companies have the ability to innovate in order to reduce the time to completion of a simulation. I/O bottlenecks can be removed or reduced with file systems that work in parallel. A combination of fast hardware and the software to take advantage of many hardware devices allows organizations to run more simulations in less time than before.
In order to test various combinations of hardware and software, real world software should be bench marked with the amount of data that would typically be seen in an organizations workflow. In this particular example a benchmark was designed to test and validate storage platforms using production grade SeisSpace ProMAX workflows, enabling end-users to choose the best seismic processing infrastructure Landmark’s validation testing comprised a subset of the benchmarking flow suite data to simulate a large modern marine seismic survey over a very simple geologic model. The data set simulated ‘shooting’ with 15 streamers, 500 channels per streamer and 6,001 floating point samples per channel (more than 3.2 million trances) over a geological model having layers dipping to the northeast.
The primary advantages behind parallel storage are sustained high performance and the ability to easily scale upward to support larger workloads. When used in conjunction with data intensive seismic processing workflows, some examples of the advantages are:
• Scale storage I/O performance linearly or near-linearly with seismic processing workflows.
• Shared access to large volumes of data over multiple, internal teams
• Eliminate data silos and simplify data management infrastructure and minimize data center footprint and TCP
• More than 1100% faster execution for large IO portion of seismic processing workflows
• More than 300% faster end-to-end seismic processing workflow execution enabling three times more seismic simulations resulting in higher fidelity geological analysis
Read this very interesting whitepaper that explains how selecting the proper parallel file system that has been matched to the simulation that is needed can increase the performance of complex simulations, and reducing time to completion. Download this whitepaper today to learn more about the importance of a storage system to aid in energy exploration.
