For years I’ve maintained that there’s a connection between the video games my daughter plays and the squiggly lines and earth models that geoscientists use to find drillable targets. For years I felt like a lone voice in the wilderness, and I heard young geoscientists who were more comfortable with a video game than a geologic map disparagingly called “joystick geophysicists.”

I’m happy to say that I can no longer be dubbed simply “that crazy woman who writes for E&P” (although in many other ways that label is certainly fitting). No, at least two different bits of information have crossed my desk recently that prove my theory. Not only are video games training our next generation of geoscientists, but the consoles the games are played on may very well be the format for the next generation of processing and interpretation tools.

You scoff. I’m not making this up. No less an august consortium than the Mission-Oriented Seismic Research Program (M-OSRP), based at the University of Houston, has joined forces with IBM (perhaps you’ve heard of them?) to examine the use of computer technology originally designed for video game consoles to process massive quantities of data rapidly.

“IBM is supporting [M-OSRP] with a Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/BE) system that represents a new generation of powerful supercomputers with substantial parallelism built in at the core level,” the press release states. “Such highly parallel computing technology is characterized by multiple processors executing and analyzing different types of data at once.”

The Cell/BE processor was originally designed for the Sony PlayStation 3.

The idea behind M-OSRP is to change the way geophysicists think about seismic processing algorithms, and to do this effectively it needs better computing power. “One of the algorithms developed within M-OSRP to suppress a form of coherent noise called internal multiples places a high bar on seismic data collection and a very high bar on computing speed and memory,” the release states. “To allow the petroleum industry to use this very effective methodology for 3-D data will require a new computing vision and capability.” IBM researchers have recoded the algorithm for the Cell/BE processor and are running comparisons with industry-standard computer architectures, it continues.

Meanwhile, another team chose to simply crunch the data on the PlayStation itself. In a paper titled “Playing with a seismic PlayStation,” C.J. Bednar and J. Bee Bednar of Panorama Technologies presented their findings at the recent European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers annual meeting in London.

“Rather than focus on only one computationally intensive algorithm, we attempt to discuss various aspects of the more popular seismic imaging algorithms,” their abstract states. They go on to discuss the nature of software optimization in the Cell and memory limitations relating to ray tracing, Kirchhoff imaging, common azimuth imaging, one-way dual-domain imaging, full finite-difference two-way reverse time imaging and seismic modeling. They also compare the computational speed of the Cell processor with modern multicore chips from AMD and Intel.

The authors drew the following preliminary conclusions:
“Assessing the difficulties associated with achieving acceptable performance on PS3-style devices suggest that programming them will not be a serious impediment to programmers already familiar with high-performance computation and I/O code… Panorama Technologies’ entire software suite was installed without difficulty.” They go on to state that various modeling and imaging techniques were easily modified to take advantage of the Cell architecture and that it was not beyond imagination to think that the system could operate 20 to 25 times faster than equivalent 2.2 GHz processors. However, initial tests on ray tracing did not achieve “acceptable performance,” despite the fact that ray tracing is one of the primary aspects of any 3-D gaming application.

I’m sure this isn’t really an issue — by the time the industry gets these issues sorted out, the PlayStation 3 will be so 6 months ago.