As the first corporate recipient of a prestigious Dell Inc. award, a geophysical contractor shows that the upstream industry knows a thing or two about computers.

When it comes to pushing the envelope of computer capabilities, the upstream oil and gas industry has practically written the manual.

Seismic data processing, in particular, is a very computationally intensive procedure, so much so that shortcuts are the rule rather than the exception in many processing algorithms because the compute power simply hasn't been able to keep up with the demand.

So when compute power takes a major step forward, it's not surprising that geophysical contractors are some of the first in line to take advantage of the new capabilities. And, if they're lucky, computer manufacturers sit up and take notice.

Such is the case with Compagnie Generale de Geophysique (CGG), which recently received a "Center for Research Excellence Award" from Dell Computer, one of the largest PC manufacturers in the US. Dell helped pioneer the "cluster" concept, where the work that once would have been done by a hugely expensive "supercomputer" is taken on by clusters of PCs working in tandem. The cluster concept has been quick to catch on in the seismic processing industry.

So why the hubbub? For one thing, this is the first corporate organization to receive this distinction from Dell, and it has the largest Dell-based HPCC deployment in its US headquarters in Houston. The company deployed the Houston cluster in 2001 with 128 Dell PowerEdge servers and has since grown its cluster to incorporate more than 3,000 Dell systems.

But what is even more interesting is that, while Dell is known for building custom systems for its customers, this is more than a case of CGG getting online and ordering a few PCs with DVD drives or improved graphics cards. CGG has helped Dell in its development of the cluster concept as much as Dell has helped CGG do pre-stack depth migration more quickly.

"What CGG has done is demonstrate that you can take the industry standard server and put it in a cluster and parallelize it and replace supercomputers in the process," said Michael Dell, chairman, chief executive officer and founder of Dell. "CGG has really been a pioneer in the development process and in developing the tools to a very large-scale cluster. This has been integral to our own progress in developing products for other customers."

According to CGG Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Robert Brunck, the fact that a geophysical contractor is the first corporate recipient of this award is really not that surprising. "The geophysical industry has consistently been at the forefront of efforts to push the limits of computing capacity," Brunck said. "It gives me considerable personal pleasure to see our industry being recognized."

The industry, in fact, has a mind-boggling amount of computer capability. "If you combined the computer capacity of all of the geophysical companies, it's likely the industry would possess the most computing power in the world," Brunck said.

The industry might provide an interesting case study for how clients push clients, who in turn push more clients, to continually improve their performance, which in turn pushes technology in a direction that no one could have foreseen a decade or two earlier. As recently as the mid-1990s geophysical contractors were forced to invest in new, expensive "supercomputers" every couple of years just to keep abreast of their clients' needs for better, faster, cheaper data. With Moore's Law in place (computer power doubling every 18 months or so), it was impossible to recoup that investment before the new-and-improved version of the supercomputer came on the market, rendering everything that had come before it instantly obsolete.

Then came the cluster concept, where inexpensive PCs could be grouped together to equal the processing power of a supercomputer at a fraction of the cost. But it's not plug-and-play by any means.
"Our success shows how well we have mastered the client server technology as well as the capacity," Brunck said. "This award is a credit to our engineers. Thank you for your work."

He added that this is "only the beginning of an exciting era for our clients," as CGG plans to install 1,100 more CPUs worldwide in the near future. He also said that as clients become more interested in time-lapse studies, turnaround time will become an even greater issue. Greater compute power will enable contractors to meet that demand, and it will also allow them to "process data naturally," Brunck said.
"We can add back the traces that we haven't been allowed to process in the past because we didn't have the compute power," he said. "Our business needed parallel computing. We can now process every single raypath."

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