SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate the implementation of a virtual computer environment that leverages the bandwidth and connectivity of the Internet and computer resources available from multiple geographically dispersed computer systems. This solution will be applied to one of the most compute intensive commercial industries: the 2 billion dollar worldwide seismic imaging market for energy exploration and development. This is a powerful and compelling demonstration of the abilities of the Internet and grid computing to enhance the real time value chain for the end consumer, and will usher in a new business approach for the energy exploration industry, and for other compute intensive markets such as: fluid flow modeling, aeronautics, genetic simulation, computational chemistry, astrophysics, nuclear simulation, and computational physics. The particular demonstration of the Grid technology will be in the seismic computing market ($2 billion per year). This market has been expanding because of the dwindling supply of known reserves and the increased worldwide competition for new sources of oil and gas. The capability to accurately image and evaluate reservoirs before drilling is fundamentally important to exploration companies because of the high cost of drilling wells

The proposed work will transform the Phase I prototype into production-ready commercial quality software, and demonstrate it on 3-D seismic data. The key technical innovations of the Phase II project are (1) a multi-resolution data visualizer, (2) a data-staging tool, and (3) a multi-channel collaboration tool to support collaborative visualization and data analysis on the grid. The proposed technology will allow multiple users to share and interact with multidimensional grid-dispersed data sets, while viewing independent multiple renderings with resolutions and bandwidths commensurate to their local display and network capabilities. The proposed technology will be enabled by implementing several grid services, and a virtual file system, that make grid deployed data sets appear local to the user. This implementation comprises the bulk of the technical tasks, and leverages the middleware. The immediate outcome of the Phase II project will be a version of Internet Seismic Processing production software (INSP) with specialized features for remote visualization, data staging, and collaborative analysis of seismic images on the grid. The ultimate objective of the Phase II project is a commercial grid-enabled software product providing scientific data, services, computing power, and visualization on demand, not only to the oil and gas industry but to a much wider range of application areas, such as geographic information systems, education, medical imaging, and battlefield management. The product will push the limits of what can be done, and fully contribute to a new business paradigm, made possible by the advent of the grid, allowing businesses to concentrate on their core competencies and rely on other entities for grid-enabled context technologies, without deterring from their primary objectives. The outcome of Phase II will be a commercial implementation and utilization of the grid, and the toolkit, which up until now, has been used mostly in academic and research applications. This technology will first be commercialized in a strategically important economic sector; namely, for the exploration of new energy resources. Specific to U.S. energy needs, this unique application of high end information technology to an area of economic and national importance will ultimately open up new exploration venues in extremely complicated geological conditions, leading to new discoveries, and decreasing US dependence on imported oil.