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Grid computing for seismic processing

TruGrid, Houston, Texas, U.S.

Corresponding author: fkarbarz@trugrid.net

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

To state the obvious, technical computing is essential to successful exploration for and development of natural resources because it, if available in sufficient quantity, is what allows engineers and geoscientists to access/process huge volumes of raw seismic data, display the information in various formats that facilitate interpretation, and manipulate the data to simulate complex reservoir depletion scenarios. However, despite decreasing costs for computing hardware, the total cost of owning and maintaining an ever-growing server infrastructure effectively limits many companies from truly exploiting the full potential of technical computing.

At first, technical computing seems like a scalability problem—i.e., it's a function of how much computing power it takes to solve a problem. You can temporarily solve that problem by purchasing additional or more powerful servers. But that creates an economic problem—i.e., how much does it cost to own and manage the servers? The cost of distributed server infrastructures is compounded by the complexity of the network, not to mention that the real value-added is in the application that runs on the servers, not the servers themselves.

This is a classic dilemma in the geoscience industry. However, a recent revelation—computers connected by a network resemble an electricity grid—is threatening to completely change the economics of technical computing. The reason is that, collectively, any number of computers on the grid can be aggregated and utilized to expedite a solution to a computational problem. After the unfamiliarity and security concerns are addressed, the defining metric for any computing problem is simply time—i.e., how quickly can a satisfactory result be computed?

So, what is the status of grid computing? Is it on the immediate horizon? The evolution of grid computing is much like that of the Internet, which was originally a network to link academic information resources. The "founder" of grid computing is Ian Foster, . . . [Full Text of this Article]