Tricon Geophysics accelerates oil and gas discovery with IBM iDataPlex supercomputer

Tricon Geophysics, Inc. is a processing, seismic imaging and reservoir characterization company for the oil and gas industry with offices located in Denver, CO, Houston, TX, Caracas, Venezuela, and Bogota, Colombia. Tricon provides 3D and 2D seismic imaging services including 3D pre-stack migration. Tricon has become a recognized leader in the process of pre-stack merging of existing 3D volumes.

The discovery of new underground reserves of oil and gas relies heavily on seismography. Prospecting companies create vibrations using vibroseis trucks or explosives on land, and air guns under sea, and measure the reflected pressure waves from underground structures using sensors. When the underground rocks are uniform, it is relatively simple to use the reflected pressure waves to build up detailed and accurate three-dimensional underground maps. These maps help prospecting companies identify the most likely places to find oil or gas reserves, maximizing the likelihood that costly exploratory drilling will produce a return on investment.

However, when there is underground structural complexity, the pressure waves will be scattered (reflected and diffracted), creating an inaccurate picture. The technique of “seismic migration” uses advanced computational algorithms to perform an inversion operation involving the rearrangement of seismic information elements so that reflections and diffractions are plotted at their true locations.

The need for speed
In general terms, oil and gas companies are under increasing pressure from their stakeholders to find new reserves faster, and this creates constant demand for more compute power in seismic migration. In the particular case of Tricon Geophysics, there were two additional factors driving the need to invest in new supercomputing facilities. First, the Venezuelan government had started offshore prospecting north of the Paria Peninsula, in 2,500 km² blocks (much larger than typical onshore blocks). Second, there was increasing demand for more sophisticated onshore seismic migrations, fueling explosive growth in data volumes.

The existing cluster at Tricon Geophysics was not powerful enough to meet customer demands, and there were significant physical constraints on building a new supercomputer. The company's Caracas data center had very limited floorspace, cooling capacity and electrical power-making it vital to find a solution that offered extremely high compute power within a compact and energy-efficient form-factor.

Cool, compact, efficient
Working with IBM Systems Lab Services and Training, IBM Global Technology Services and IBM Business Partner Strix Technologies, S.A., Tricon Geophysics selected an IBM System x® iDataPlex™ running Red Hat Enterprise Linux® as the basis for its new supercomputer. The iDataPlex is half the depth of a standard 42U rack, but can hold twice the usual number of servers. Each of the 84 iDataPlex dx340 nodes in the rack features two quad-core Intel® Xeon® 5440 Series 2.83GHz processors and 32GB RAM. Cooling is provided by an IBM Rear Door Heat eXchanger, which cuts cooling costs by 20 percent, compared to a standard rack with equivalent compute power. Pre-processing of the seismic data for the TSUNAMI Migration Suite application running on the iDataPlex is handled by an IBM System x3950 M2 server also running Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

iDataPlex is a key solution in the IBM Dynamic Infrastructure portfolio, providing a flexible and highly efficient platform that enables businesses to manage the significant ongoing growth in data volumes while decreasing their energy costs and carbon footprint.

“IBM proposed iDataPlex, which solved all three physical problems in our data center, giving us a flexible, low-cost solution that helps us improve customer service,” says Bernardo Briones, Tricon Geophysics Venezuela General Manager. “We estimate that the iDataPlex consumes 40 percent less energy than the alternative solutions we considered, and the cooling requirements are similarly reduced. It is also extremely compact, packing 672 processor cores in a double-density rack including the Rear Door heat Exchanger, making it the ideal solution for us. Without iDataPlex, we would have needed to move offices in order to have a larger data center.”

Technology and service and Systems Lab Services and Training
The IBM Global Technology Services and Systems Lab Services and Training team helped Tricon Geophysics to set up and operate the new platform, and now provides ongoing maintenance and technical support. “Our in-house system engineer worked closely with IBM Global Technology Services, and the skills-transfer gave us confidence that we could operate the iDataPlex cluster,” says Bernardo Briones. “IBM provides a very responsive service when we require expert external support, and the consultants from Strix are also highly capable.”

Green light for business success
The iDataPlex solution has quadrupled the speed of processing at Tricon Geophysics, enabling the company to process larger and more complex geophysical data sets within shorter timeframes. Faster computation enables Tricon Geophysics' customers to find new reserves faster and with a greater degree of certainty, minimizing the need for costly exploratory drilling.

“IBM iDataPlex has given us a significant advantage over our local competitors, enabling us to carry out complex seismic migrations on massive data sets much more rapidly,” says Bernardo Briones. “Seismic data in Venezuela is classified as nonexportable by the government, so prospecting companies can no longer send it to very large computational clusters abroad. With iDataPlex, we can meet their deadlines while keeping the data in-country - this means that we can deliver a much more attractive service.”

The iDataPlex solution actually delivered even better results than expected at Tricon Geophysics. Bernardo Briones cites the example of a particular migration that previously took two months to run, and can now be completed within just two weeks. The company's customers get their results faster, which contributes to their ability to find and bring new reserves to production faster.

“In addition to giving us a significant increase in processing power, while keeping energy and cooling requirements low, the IBM iDataPlex solution was quick and easy to deploy,” says Bernardo Briones. “The iDataPlex solution is effectively a supercomputer-in-a-box: a packaged solution that we were able to deploy in our existing data center without any requirement for specialist racks or cooling systems. We can now run more sophisticated migrations on larger data sets and produce faster results for our customers - the IBM technology has effectively opened up a new market for us, enabling us to compete against larger data processing companies in the US.”