Alliant Geophysical 3D prestack depth migration software on Cray T3EHouston 07 September 2001 Cray and seismic company Alliant Geophysical will collaborate to reduce the turnaround time of depth imaging projects for oil companies. The companies agreed to make Alliant Geophysical's 3D prestack depth migration software run optimally on Cray T3E highly scalable supercomputer systems.
Three-dimensional prestack depth
migration is a technique for 'imaging' oil and gas reserves from
seismic data, and is used to improve the odds for finding oil. The
Alliant software, 3DWAVE, employs the shot-record finite difference
method, a technique that is more accurate, but also more
computationally intensive, than the established Kirchhoff method. The
Kirchhoff method for 3D prestack depth migration first became feasible
with the introduction of prior-generation Cray supercomputers in
the mid-1990s.
The companies said the initial software porting has been completed
and optimization work will be complete by year-end. As part of the
collaboration agreement, Cray has delivered a Cray T3E system to
Alliant for the company's use in this commercial effort. In return,
Cray T3E systems and subsequent Cray supercomputers to which the
Alliant software is ported will be the first supercomputer-class
platforms for Alliant's 3D prestack depth migration software,
according to George Stephenson, head of petroleum industry sales for
Cray Inc.
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