oa Advanced IO Implementation & Performances for Seismic Applications

Oil & Gas companies are facing an increasing challenge on extracting performances from parallel IO filesystems for check-pointing and writing results. Those efforts will increasingly become an issue due to the complexity introduced by the integration of more sophisticated seismic imaging equations in order to sustain the need of more detailed images to face the next exploration and production challenges. As current and future generations High Performance Computing (HPC) systems are evolving toward an increase computing power, IO bandwidth is remaining relatively constant. Henceforth, the need to manage IO efficiently at scale will become a strict requirement.

We will present an implementation and optimization study of ADIOS in the context of seismic imaging. We will exhibit a performance study made on a proxy application and on a RTM for several computing kernels for different HPC systems in the context of check-pointing. We will show that using ADIOS can provide good performances, manage more efficiently IO and reduce meta-data contention. We will highlight that advanced IO libraries such as ADIOS provide the opportunity to overcome the challenges of maintaining performances with high level IO interfaces at scale.