SBIR Phase I: FPGA-accelerated 3-D Waveform Inversion For Geophysical Exploration

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will investigate the feasibility of a high-performance FPGA implementation of full 3-D seismic Waveform Inversion (WFI), the most advanced and resource-demanding seismic imaging application used today in the oil and gas industry. The objective of WFI is to estimate a model of the Earth?s subsurface that minimizes the difference between recorded data and synthetic simulated data derived from an iteratively adjusted Earth model. The computational kernel of WFI is the 3-D wave equation in a heterogeneous medium. This equation is solved repeatedly in a gradient optimization process yielding highly accurate seismic images. The deliverable of the Phase I project will be a novel Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementation of an especially optimized WFI kernel in the form of a socket compliant special-purpose device. In a continuation Phase II project, the Phase I deliverable will be evolved into a prototype full-fledged implementation of WFI, delivering order-of-magnitudes improvements in performance over conventional software implementations on traditional hardware. As microprocessors reach the limits of attainable clock frequencies and power consumption, there is a growing need in the oil and gas industry to go beyond conventional computer software/hardware solutions. The proposed project addresses this need. The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to usher in a new era of low impact, low energy, and much higher-performance computing in the oil and gas industry. FPGA computing is likely to become a disruptive technology for geophysical exploration, allowing unprecedented improvements in capability and performance. With the proposed technology, 3-D seismic data will be processed faster, and used more effectively to characterize and delineate oil and gas reservoirs in extremely complicated geological settings. Furthermore, the proposed technology will enable WFI in production settings. The urgent need for this new capability is highlighted by domestic and foreign oil companies' recent announcements that their main technological focus and critical requirements are for increasingly challenging environments. In this context, the accurate, higher resolution, and faster seismic imaging enabled by FPGAs will have economic impact by: (1) improving the odds of finding new deposits of oil and gas, (2) reducing extraction and development costs by providing higher imaging accuracy, (3) increasing the amount of hydrocarbons recovered, augmenting the national oil and gas reserves, reducing dependence on foreign oil, and benefiting the U.S. economy.