f Seismic Imaging and HPC, how to preserve our investment and to prepare the future?

An extraordinary challenge the oil industry must face in the hydrocarbon exploration is to develop leading edge technologies to reconstitute the three-dimensional structure of the Earth. Seismic Imaging industry is made possible because of the progress of the computer capacity to process more and more data in a shorter and shorter time. “Thanks to the extraordinary progress of the computer” we have been using for almost 40 years and will still be used for the coming years. Seismic imaging industry is also made possible because the data acquisition technology has made tremendous progress. But again the technology would not have been developed if we were not able to process the huge amount of data generated by seismic data acquisition without the help of large HPC systems. For more than 30 years, seismic reflection is the main technology used in our industry. The physics is well known and is based on solving different approximations of the wave equation. Anticipating and taking advantage of the constantly evolving of the computer technology, geophysicists are able to find numerical implementation which is the most adapted to the computer hardware: from 2D to 3D, Post to Pre Stack , Asymptotic to band limited, one way to RTM, ray tomography to wave tomography and Full Wave form inversion. All these evolutions follow very closely to the progress of the HPC.