ROSS Technology and NuTec Services Team to Provide Seismic Migration Services For Oil and Gas Exploration ROSS Technology and NuTec Services Team to Provide Seismic Migration Services For Oil and Gas Exploration December 23, 1996, 8:31 AM EST
Companies Build World's Largest Seismic Migration Center
AUSTIN and STAFFORD, Texas, Dec. 23 /PRNewswire/ -- ROSS Technology, Inc., Austin, (Nasdaq NNM: RTEC) and NuTec Services, Stafford, Texas, today announced a collaborative effort that has resulted in the development of the world's largest 3-D seismic migration center dedicated to assisting the global oil and gas industry in exploration efforts. The center, located in NuTec's headquarters facility, is equipped with a hyperSERVER(TM) 7000 system from ROSS. The hyperSERVER 7000 system consists of up to 160 processors running NuTec's proprietary Concentric Computing design in a variety of parallel and distributed configurations. The center ranks as the second largest commercial high performance computing center in the United States, with a total of 52 Gigaflops of available compute power.
The center is available to oil and gas companies for outsourced 3-D seismic migration work. As part of the agreement between ROSS and NuTec, the companies will also jointly pursue opportunities to develop 3-D seismic migration centers and supercomputer centers, to be installed worldwide for oil and gas companies and other companies requiring supercomputer-class processing.
The seismic survey method of oil and gas exploration is one in which pressure waves are induced into the ground, or water in the case of offshore exploration, and are then recorded at the surface as a function of time. With 3-D seismic, the pressure waves are recorded across an area of potential exploration. Once the data has been gathered, it is processed and interpreted to represent subsurface geological formations. These formations may then be explored for potential hydrocarbon reservoirs.
Seismic migration is the critical step in data processing. When seismic data is acquired, subsurface geological formations bend and distort the data. Seismic migration is the process by which these distortions are corrected and the data is positioned. Accurate positioning increases the chance of success and improves hydrocarbon depletion, increasing return on investment.
"Our partnership with NuTec Services is ideal for ROSS Technology because it is made possible by the scalability and extensibility of our implementation of the SPARC architecture," said Roger D. Ross, Chairman, President and CEO of ROSS Technology. "Compute-intensive applications such as seismic migration have not been economically viable in the past because they require supercomputer-class processing power. However, the shared memory MPP system architecture employed by our hyperSERVER 7000 system delivers two significant benefits -- it provides equal or superior performance at a fraction of the cost of a super-computer; and, unlike a supercomputer, the hyperSERVER system's nodes are fully scalable and extensible. As the processing power requirements grow, additional nodes may be added, and each node can be upgraded to higher-performing CPUs," said Ross.
According to NuTec executives, the company initially sought to develop its seismic migration center with Hewlett-Packard Company, Palo Alto, Calif., and optimized its seismic migration software to run on H-P's PA-RISC platform. The company said it decided to switch to ROSS' hyperSPARC platform in part because in its assessment each node of the system provided by ROSS costs approximately 40 percent less and delivers 30 to 40 percent greater processing throughput than a similarly configured node from H-P.
"We benchmarked the ROSS hyperSERVER platform by using our seismic processing software to run some typical seismic traces," said Michael S. Keehan, Ph.D., President of NuTec. "The ROSS hyperSERVER system produced time-to-solution results that were about 10 percent greater than those produced by the H-P system -- very impressive considering the software was optimized to run on the H-P platform -- yet the hyperSERVER was half the cost of comparable solutions from Sun Microsystems, IBM and H-P."
Seismic migration processing speed is typically 85 percent dependent on the floating point processing performance and 15 percent dependent on the integer processing performance of the CPU employed, according to Keehan.
"The MPP architecture is technically ideal for processing seismic traces because each trace can be processed independently," said Keehan. "Furthermore, since I/0 operations make up only about one percent of the total time-to-solution in typical seismic migrations, obviating the need for supercomputer-class I/0 subsystems, the MPP architecture is also economically ideal for seismic processing. Add to that mix the inherent scalability of ROSS' approach and you have a very attractive solution," he said.
3-D seismic imaging is not a new approach -- the first experimental 3-D seismic surveys in the oil and gas industry were performed in the late 1950s -- but it took until the 1980s for the requisite field instrumentation, transport equipment and processing power to be developed and refined to the point of making 3-D seismic technically feasible. However, since 3-D seismic surveys were more inaccurate as the drilling depth increased, they were seen as an expensive and inexact method for minimizing dry hole costs and were not widely employed in oil and gas exploration. This has changed as migration algorithms have improved the accuracy of and lowered the risk of drilling. Moreover, as oil and gas industry participants have come to view accurately- migrated 3-D seismic as a cost-effective method of minimizing another key production factor -- the cost of missing much of the potential of a proven reservoir -- 3-D seismic surveys have become more common.
The strength of the 3-D seismic migration -- identifying the precise location and shape of the reservoir -- combined with a global effort within the oil and gas industry to maximize yields of drilling operations, have made 3-D seismic a crucial element of successful exploration. The industry's efforts to maximize yields are caused by two factors: the world's remaining untapped oil and gas reserves are increasingly smaller in size; and drilling costs are increasing -- the average drilling depth in 1994 was 20,000 feet. The added expense of deep wells and the smaller reserves have made data migration services by field-tested third-party analysts a necessary investment in success.
Since subsurface reservoirs are pressurized, causing an upward flow of the oil or gas in the reservoir, only a strike at the apex of the reservoir will produce a yield that maximizes recovery. In this manner, 3-D seismic's unique capability for accurately identifying the shape of the reservoir has increased its strategic importance in maximizing yields of drilling operations.
NuTec Overview
NuTec Services, incorporated in 1995, is a leading-edge seismic technology company, which is privately held. It was created to service the growing market for sophisticated 3-D seismic imaging and processing. It has combined the latest developments in UNIX and parallel computer hardware to create a new computing strategy called concentric computing. NuTec's explosive growth from this development has resulted in the world's largest seismic migration center, one of the three most powerful commercial supercomputing centers in the world. NuTec's goal is to carry these computing strategies to the oil and gas, financial and telecommunications industries.
Further information is available from NuTec's headquarters in Stafford, Texas by calling 281/265-8899.
ROSS Overview
ROSS Technology, incorporated in 1988, is a majority-owned subsidiary of Fujitsu Limited. A minority position in ROSS is held by Sun Microsystems, Inc. As of September 30, 1996, the Company's outstanding Common Stock was held 60 percent by Fujitsu, 5 percent by Sun, and 35 percent by employees and the public. The Company's objective is to drive SPARC, the industry's highest-volume reduced instruction set computing architecture, to increased performance leadership and market share. ROSS is one of the industry's most prominent suppliers of SPARC microprocessors and SPARC system products to both the OEM and end-user markets.
Further information is available on the company's World Wide Web site at ross.com, or via e-mail to info@ross.com. International customers may call for more information to 512/349-3108, or via fax to 512/349-3101.
ROSS and the ROSS logo are registered trademarks, and hyperSTATION and hyperSERVER are trademarks of ROSS Technology, Inc. All SPARC trademarks are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International. hyperSPARC is licensed exclusively to ROSS Technology, Inc. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. All other products or service names herein are trademarks of their respective owners. SOURCE Ross Technology, Inc.
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