The president's blog

More on seismic imaging and recent trade shows

First of all, my apologies for the long interval between blog posts. Q4 has been a very busy time for us – we attended two key trade shows, completed several new product releases and have been cleaning up year-end consulting projects.

In my last blog post I tried to relay the excitement we have over our seismic imaging product road map. We now know that we are not alone in this impression. We saw this first hand at SEG 2012 as interested attendees piled into our booth to hear the technical presentations featuring our current and future products (reverse time migration, elastic forward modeling, and full waveform inversion). This year’s SEG was the most successful ever for our company, the number of interested leads, meetings and general contact was the highest we have ever seen. Our recently announced agreement with DownUnder GeoSolutions was a deal that really came together during SEG. In addition to this and other direct leads, our partners Paradigm and Tsunami  also reported excellent traffic and interest. Not only did we see an uptick in software sales leads, but also in consulting leads. We had several meetings with existing clients that have already turned into new business. We also generated leads with new clients.  Overall, it was just another indication that the oil and gas sector is going to be extremely important for Acceleware going forward. We are hoping the EAGE (sort of a European SEG) show in London in June 2013 will continue this trend.

This quarter we also attended and exhibited at the SC12 a supercomputing conference held in Salt Lake City, which was equally successful with a steady stream of traffic interested in our consulting services and training. In addition to selling services, SC12 is about our partners. All of our partners including NVIDIA, Intel, Altera, AMD and Microsoft, had a large presence at SC12.  In particular it was interesting to note that both NVIDIA and Intel used Acceleware RTM benchmarks to promote their new hardware platforms. NVIDIA’s Kepler K10 and Intel’s Xeon Phi Coprocessor could see substantial demand within the oil and gas sector. We were fortunate enough to be invited to speak in a number of partner booths as well as deliver a technical tutorial as part of the conference program, providing great exposure for our products and services. Shows like SC12 allow us to participate in and even drive new HPC trends. Our customers, particularly those in oil and gas, have consistently been early adopters of new HPC technology. Our ability to help shape new hardware platform designs, and then quickly understand, adopt, and optimize for those platforms is highly valued by our customers.

On a sad note, Acceleware lost a treasured member of our family recently. Roberto Sebastien Palacio Jaramillo died in a tragic motor vehicle accident in October. Roberto will be remembered by everyone here as a gifted, tireless and creative software developer, but more importantly as a true friend, a real adventurer, and a wonderful person. Our thoughts go out to Roberto’s family in Colombia: his mother, Esther; father, Roberto; and brother, Mateo. Rest in peace, Roberto.

The end of easy oil – update on Acceleware’s seismic imaging roadmap

I think it may be a good idea to explain why Acceleware is so excited about our seismic imaging roadmap. It is a truism in the petroleum industry that “all the easy oil has been found.” New meaningful reserves will only be discovered using innovative technology and techniques. Acceleware is assisting the world’s largest oil & gas players find new oil with its seismic imaging products. So how exactly does this work?

Seismic data acquisition and processing play a key role in oil & gas exploration. The aim is to use seismic data to provide a greater understanding of sub-surface geological structures and, hence, to determine their suitability for trapping valuable hydrocarbon reservoirs. Essentially, it’s used to decide where to drill wells. The cost (and risk) of drilling dry holes particularly off-shore is becoming astronomical. Add that to the fact that we are now searching for “hard” oil leads to the requirement for advanced seismic processing.

For the entire history of seismic processing, the ability to model the Earth physics has been limited by the computational power available at the time. Until relatively recently, seismic processing techniques were rather simplistic, necessarily relying on gross simplifying approximations purely because anything more complex was beyond the scope of existing computational resources. In the days of easy oil, conventional seismic processing was sufficient. However, the “hard” oil is now in complex geological formations (sub-salt, shale, sub-basalt, etc). Places where conventional seismic techniques have been challenged to successfully image. But now, advances in computer architecture over the last few years - particularly GPU computing, combined with improved algorithmic techniques have made it possible to process seismic data in much more accurate and realistic ways, honouring the physics of seismic wave transmission and reflection to unprecedented degrees. This is how the “hard” oil is going to be found.

Interesting and changing times for Acceleware!

New Offices

At the beginning of June Acceleware moved into a new office space. We are excited about the new location as it is closer to downtown, offers excellent coffee and ice cream nearby, and is a block away from the Calgary Stampede, which celebrated its 100th anniversary this year! The new office also has an upgraded server room, and better training facilities. A nice upgrade!

Tradeshows

We recently exhibited at the European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers (EAGE) annual show in Copenhagen Denmark. The show provided many excellent opportunities to speak with customers and partners about our future seismic and CSEM imaging product road map. Judging from what we saw and heard at EAGE, Acceleware is at the forefront of Reverse Time Migration (RTM) technology and our roadmap is exactly what the market needs. Look for some new product introductions soon.