Posts tagged ‘seismic data processing’
PEMEX Awards Seismic Data Processing Contract to GX Technology
ION Geophysical Corp. announced that its seismic imaging subsidiary, GX Technology (GXT), has been awarded a multi-year contract with Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), the national oil company of Mexico. Under this contract, GXT will be delivering a broad range of seismic data processing and imaging services for multiple offshore and onshore projects during the next three years. To execute the work, GXT has established a local presence in Villahermosa, Mexico, where PEMEX’s exploration headquarters are located.
GXT will utilize its proprietary imaging technologies to process and interpret seismic data acquired on behalf of PEMEX, including in deepwater regions of the Gulf of Mexico, in highly complex subsalt areas, and in various onshore regions throughout Mexico. The scope of services includes velocity model building and pre-stack depth migration (PreSDM) using both beam migration and reverse time migration (RTM) techniques. By establishing a presence in Villahermosa, GXT professionals will be able to collaborate closely with their PEMEX counterparts on a daily basis in order to accelerate the interpretation of the imaging results and to identify new exploration and development drilling targets rapidly.
Jose Antonio Escalera, Sub-Director of Exploration Technology at PEMEX, commented: “PEMEX will be investing heavily in hydrocarbon exploration and development in the years ahead. Much of this investment will be directed at E&P projects in which the targets are located in complex geologic regimes, including in fractured carbonate and deepwater subsalt reservoirs. Processing these datasets requires the most advanced imaging techniques. GXT is well suited to help us address these challenges and have demonstrated their ability to deliver superior images within our required timeframes.”
PGS Chooses CyrusOne as Data Center Provider
Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS) will occupy a 10,000 sq ft data hall in CyrusOne’s newest co-located data center located in West Houston. PGS will co-locate high-density, mission-critical data and applications servers to support exploration projects and operations worldwide.
These data processing systems and applications support several critical functions at PGS, including large-scale seismic data processing, complex reservoir analysis and interpretation and electromagnetic services. PGS desired a data center solution that could provide a secure, scalable, high-density environment for the enormous amounts of vital data needed to sustain the success of its business. PGS also wanted a colocation provider that matched its commitment to minimizing environmental impact related to data center infrastructure and power consumption.
This data hall represents PGS’ largest and most robust data center environment in North America, with 10,000 sq ft of high-powered servers to render maximum application reliability and security.
Geotrace Accelerates Oil and Gas Discovery with Isilon IQ
NAS vendor Isilon® Systems announced that Geotrace, a reservoir services provider, has deployed Isilon IQ to power a robust suite of seismic data processing and analysis applications used to accelerate worldwide oil and gas discovery. Using Isilon scale-out NAS, featuring its OneFS® operating system, Geotrace has created a single global namespace for both its Unix and Linux-based cluster compute environments, streamlining seismic data access to reduce data processing times from weeks to days. With Isilon, Geotrace can complete more projects in less time and with greater accuracy, all while requiring less than one full-time worker to manage the system.
“Our seismic data processing and analysis operations serve oil and gas leaders around the world, meaning our workflow is both mission-critical and very time-sensitive,” said Matt Gaskamp, data center operations manager, Geotrace. “We don’t have time to manage multiple storage systems and perform the ongoing data migration necessary with traditional storage. With Isilon, all of our data is in one, immediately accessible location, allowing our engineers to work collaboratively around the clock and get more done, faster, with less cost.”
Prior to using Isilon IQ, Geotrace employed separate traditional storage systems to support the two primary components of its workflow: seismic data processing and analysis. When Geotrace moved to a data center model leveraging both Unix and Linux-based cluster compute environments each running hundreds of servers to process and analyze data simultaneously, these traditional systems were incapable of providing the single global namespace or linear scaling of performance and capacity necessary to power Geotrace’s workflow effectively.
By turning to Isilon, Geotrace unified both its massive compute clusters onto a single, high-performance, highly scalable, shared pool of storage, enabling engineers to access data seamlessly between clusters at all stages of the workflow without having to migrate data back and forth, increasing productivity and accelerating time to results. With Isilon IQ, Geotrace eliminated the costly and time-consuming manual data migrations and lengthy scaling delays common when using traditional HPC storage alongside traditional SAN or NAS.
“Traditional storage systems lack the performance, scalability and ease of use to effectively power seismic processing and analysis, forcing today’s most innovative oil and gas companies to deploy disparate, disconnected systems or find a better alternative,” said Sam Grocott, senior director of product management, Isilon Systems. “Geotrace is one of many leading-edge companies that have found an improved approach by deploying scale-out NAS. With Isilon, Geotrace unified its workflow and increased operational efficiency, demonstrating that with Isilon IQ, innovative organizations can do more – better – with less.”
Spectrum Boosts Data Processing Capacity in Houston by 50%
Spectrum has completed a series of computer facility upgrades at its regional data processing and imaging center in Houston, Texas that will increase capacity by 50%. The technology upgrades applied over the past six months will prepare Spectrum’s largest computing facility for a scheduled increase in multi-client processing projects from the fourth quarter of 2009 onwards, and help fulfill increased international demand for pre-stack depth and time imaging services on behalf of oil company clients.
Technology upgrades included increasing the CPU units in the Houston processing clusters by 50% and adding two new master servers. Other new equipment included a new 32-core Sun M5000 server with an additional 120 TB of high-specification Onstor primary disc storage. The processing center infrastructure has also been enhanced with additional electrical and air conditioning support to maintain optimum operating conditions.
PetroComputing 