f The evolution of HPC and its opportunities and challenges for Seismic Imaging

One of the most important factors for Oil & Gas industry (as for any other industry) is the ability of making predictions about the future. In particular, in this workshop we are concerned with forecasts about the future of HPC and its impact on seismic imaging industry. Needless to say, everyone can predict that hardware performance will continue increasing in the future, but one question that it is interesting to address is: how much? One reliable answer can come from the Top500 list. Indeed, Professor Hans Meuer at University of Mannheim, one of the fathers of Top500, has shown (Meuer, 2008) that, according to historical data, the performance of the system classified at the bottom of the list follows a linear trend on a logarithmic scale (see Figure 1). The rate of growth is around 2x every 13 months, faster than Moore’s law that assumes 2x every 18 months. The nice fit of the data to this trend suggests a good confidence in using the linear trend for extrapolation. The result of such extrapolation is the prediction that between 2015 and 2016 all the systems in the list will exceed the performance of 1 Petaflop/sec. Likewise, it is not unreasonable to predict that this figure will be the minimum standard for all the major players in the seismic imaging industry, both Oil Companies and Service Companies. This is certainly a good news for seismic imaging applications like Reverse Time Migration, Full Waveform Inversion and Seismic Modelling that are amongst the most compute intensive.