Cloud-based analysis of seismic data in the oil&gas industry


 

 

Sharp Reflections operates in the area of seismic processing, offering software and services. It is based in Norway, Germany, the UK and the USA. Sharp Reflections’ software allows the interactive steering of the processing by coupling visualisation on the desktop with processing on an HPC-system. The aim of this Case Study is to enable small seismic processing companies and small oil and gas exploration companies to analyse their data using the capabilities of an HPC cloud, without the need to buy a compute cluster themselves. Sharp Reflections’ software will be set up to run as a service on a Cloud-based-HPC platform enabling better geological insights and supporting oil and gas exploration

Analysis of seismic data is a key technology for exploration in the Oil&Gas industry. This need is often served by smaller engineering consulting companies like Sharp Reflections AS and Seismic Image Processing Ltd (SIP). Dealing with increasingly complex geological targets, higher resolution seismic data and their interpretation has become of strategic importance for those companies and their customers. The Pre-Stack PRO software developed and marketed by Sharp Reflections GmbH is addressing this need of high resolution by taking advantage of innovative and powerful computation and visualization capacities. Pre-Stack PRO is unique in the sense that it is by design scalable in all its components, and unlike concurrent software it enables the users to work interactively on very large so called pre-stack data sets.

The target of “The Seismic Experiment Cloud” Project is to give European SMEs access to the processing capabilities of Pre-Stack PRO to enable them to perform leading-edge data processing and interpretation for large pre-stack seismic data sets without the need to install a local compute cluster. The experiments will implement and offer a “HPC-Cloud Release” of the Pre-Stack PRO including a data staging facility needed for large scale seismic data. The business impact of the cloud solution will be investigated. It is expected that such a service will provide cost-effective access to the analysis software and HPC resources and thus enable European SMEs like SIP or Sharp AS to compete with larger companies in the field of large scale seismic analysis for oil & gas exploration and beyond, for instance geothermal energy.

 

 



Project:

Partners:
 Sharp Reflections AS, Seismic Image Processing Ltd (SIP), Sharp Reflections GmbH, Fraunhofer ITWM, Sharp GmbH, Fraunhofer ITWM, Bull, University of Stuttgart

Sector
Energy

Keywords
Modelling & Simulation

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