Beyond Traditional Microprocessors for Geoscience High-Performance Computing Applications

Olav Lindtjorn, Robert G. Clapp, Oliver Pell, Haohuan Fu, Michael J. Flynn, Oskar Mencer

Abstract: The oil and gas industry is a major user of high-performance computing, and geoscience computational cycles are dominated by kernels that are relatively few and well defined. This project explores accelerating geoscience applications using FPGA-based hardware, optimizing the algorithm and the hardware to achieve maximum performance. This approach can deliver speedup of 20 to 70 times compared with a conventional HPC node.