January 31: So I ended up in Zhuozhou City about 120km from Beijing this week as a guest of the Geophysical Research Institute (GRI). I have trouble following the connection chart, and it changes, but to make a long, convoluted story seem short: it seems like the path is China National Petroleum Company (CNPC), which is then connected to PetroChina, which is then or also connected to the Bureau of Geophysical Processing (BGP), which is then the parent of GRI. GRI is the seismic processing workhorse and I think they do most of the seismic processing for the Chinese oilfields/companies. They do a lot of international work as well.[more/]

GRI totally sees the benefit of GPUs and they are very interested in the prospect of installing significant processing capacity in a much smaller space, power and cooling footprint. They also have a strong interest in land-based RTM: RTM makes GPUs almost a requirement for reasonable turnaround times and efficient costs per shot and, from the geophysical perspective, I would say that there is still lots of learning/production experience that can be gained. I think it is safe to say that RTM is predominantly used for marine environments and sub-salt imaging applications. Land RTM adds a bunch of additional complexities – topography, “ground roll”, questionable coupling of the earth material to the geophones, source/receiver sparsity/spacing issues and so on. This, “land RTM”, is something we continue to work on and sort out but it is far from being a slam dunk, in our opinion. GRI has already evaluated many RTM’s and they have decided that they don’t like the images, thus far. At least, that’s how it was phrased to me. This could mean a few things: Acceleware’s RTM actually works – this is what one of our ISV partners in Houston www.tsunamidevelopment.com asserts every time I talk to him, but I would say he definitely has a healthy bias; one day I can share some of his rants about what he says it takes to create and support production seismic processing software in the market, all of which we are doing and which is why he chose us, and comments like “generating one or two images from a few datasets is the EASY part” but I digress… - and so an Acceleware RTM evaluation would prove more successful than prior evaluations, GRI’s not going to like anyone’s results enough or it’s just a really unfriendly dataset. I always get the impression that we pretty much have performance in the bag – and our next release will add even more – but the first decision for them, like every other customer/prospect, is geophysical image quality.

On a personal note, for those of you who don’t know me, I am 6’7” (2.01metres) tall. Never before have I felt like such a freak – travelling in Europe, the US, Saudi Arabia, even Singapore. When I was riding the underground subway in Beijing, people would nudge their friends, kids would point me out to their parents and all that stuff. It would have been greatly amusing, if it weren’t for the fact that everyone was staring at me!