NEC SX-5 first to sustain over 1 Gflop/s on Focus

 Houston 01 Nov 99 Paradigm Geophysical Ltd. and NEC Corporation announced the immediate availability of the popular FOCUS (V4.3) Seismic Processing System for NEC SX-4 and SX-5 Series supercomputers. NEC SX-5 demonstrated excellent job throughput on a standard performance test used by Paradigm. The test consists of a series of compute and I/O modules used extensively by the seismic industry. It is designed to provide a realistic processing model typical of key day-to-day seismic analysis. The sustained performance on this historical test exceeded 1 Gflop/s on a single SX-5 processor.

FOCUS provides both interactive and batch processing for the generation of 2-D and 3-D seismic images needed to support accurate and economical oil and gas exploration. FOCUS results are time critical because they are used to guide the next steps in exploration while the crews and equipment are still deployed in the field. Additionally, with higher performance systems such as the SX-5, new and more rigorous methods can now be economically used on a day-to-day basis rather than requiring special-cased environments, as was previously the case.

NEC SX-5 demonstrated excellent job throughput on a standard performance test used by Paradigm. The test consists of a series of compute and I/O modules used extensively by the seismic industry. It is designed to provide a realistic processing model typical of key day-to-day seismic analysis. The sustained performance on this historical test exceeded 1 Gflop/s on a single SX-5 processor. The high sustainable performance was attributed to the SX-5 being a well-balanced system with respect to processor, memory, and I/O capabilities.

"The outstanding performance achieved by FOCUS V4.3 on NEC SX-5 supercomputers will provide a tremendous benefit to the seismic industry in terms of faster turnaround," said Duane Dopkin, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Paradigm. "We are pleased to work closely with NEC Corporation and to provide our customers with a fully integrated solution to handle very large 3-D seismic problems."

"Our SX-5 is the leading parallel-vector system available today, and has price-performance comparable to high end RISC based servers. Having this high performance version of FOCUS V4.3 on the SX-5 will be a great benefit to our petroleum customers," said Tadashi Watanabe, Vice President, NEC Corporation.

 

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