Leveraging Scalable Cloud Computing to Facilitate Collaborative, Large-Volume Pre-Stack Data Analysis: A Frontier Basin Example

Analysis and interpretation of pre-stack seismic data has historically been limited by the compute capacity and storage required to visualize, process, and analyze large volumes of pre-stack seismic traces in a typical 3D seismic survey. Over the past decade, Sharp Reflections has developed a solution to this problem by leveraging advancements in parallelized computing and memory sharing capabilities in High Performance Computing (HPC) environments to produce a software package (Pre-Stack Pro) designed to view, process, and interpret full fidelity pre-stack seismic data volumes, in memory, in real-time.

In recent years, Sharp Reflections has adapted Pre-Stack Pro to run in public compute clouds, benefits of which have been multi-fold; access to required software and hardware resources from any location at any time; scalability options allowing customization of cluster sizes for the survey size at hand; and increased opportunity for collaboration across geophysical disciplines and geographically distant locations.

This presentation describes how OMV New Zealand and Sharp Reflections exploited the new cloud digital building block to develop a new full-fidelity workflow for pre-stack data analysis, QC, improvement and interpretation using a remote compute solution. The subject data set was a large frontier exploration survey from the Great South Basin in New Zealand.