Chevron Energy Technology Company and Maxeler Technologies will present results of their work on acceleration of seismic processing using FPGAs at the 78th Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) Meeting in Las Vegas. SEG is the premier geoscience event in the world, featuring more than 300 exhibiting international companies as well as comprehensive technical program.

Chevron demonstrate a Maxeler FPGA co-processor technology applied to acoustic isotropic finite difference modeling that is capable of achieving speedups in the range of 2 orders of magnitude compared to single-core implementation of the finite difference application on modern CPU chips.

The implications of these results are twofold: (a) non-standard HPC technologies, such as FPGA chips, can play a useful role in seismic data processing; and (b) the traditional notion of what is computationally cheap or expensive can be severely altered with the emerging new hardware and software technologies.