HPCwire: Fraunhofer Releases Seismic Production Code

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November 07, 2008

Fraunhofer Releases Seismic Production Code

Nov. 7 -- The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics (ITWM), located in Kaiserslautern, Germany, has announced the release of its Kirchhoff Migration Code for Cell-based clusters. With an output of one million points/minute for the full SEG C3NA benchmark on its 60 node Cell cluster, Kirchhoff Migration is taking the next step to become interactive. In a blade-to-blade comparison, the code runs on Cell (3.2 GHz) six times faster than on a Dual-Core Intel (3.2 GHz) configuration.

Kirchhoff migration is a basic ray-based migration algorithm in seismic data processing. The Fraunhofer implementation is a parallel 3-D pre-stack depth migration code that is based on a fully-dynamic wavefront ray tracer. So far, the code has been available as an MPI and a grid-enabled version.

In June 2008, Fraunhofer installed a new supercomputer cluster based on IBM's QS22 Cell platform, which is one of the world's most energy-efficient clusters. With its 70 blades and the InfiniBand switch, it fits into two racks and consumes less than 20 KW of electrical power while delivering 28 TFlop of floating point performance.

"In the new Kirchhoff code we could combine the Fraunhofer Virtual Machine and our Cell know-how to make a really fast piece of production-ready software," says Dr. Franz-Josef Pfreundt, head of the ITWM Competence Center for HPC and Visualization.

The code has been benchmarked using the SEG C3NA data set and using some large proprietary measured data sets. The comparision with a 3.2 Ghz Dual-Core Intel configuration shows a factor six advantage for a Cell blade against an x86 blade. In the Fraunhofer setup, the software scales as expected pretty well to the full size of the system.

With one million output points per minute for the SEG benchmark on 60 Cell blades, the Fraunhofer Kirchhoff Code has now become an interactive tool to improve seismic data quality. The exploitation of more advanced seismic imaging algorithms for multicore architectures is part of a strategic cooperation between Fraunhofer and StatoilHydro.

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Source: Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics (ITWM)

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