Acceleration of stochastic seismic inversion in OpenCL-based heterogeneous platforms

• Novel approach to accelerate a Stochastic Seismic AVO Inversion algorithm.
• Exploitation of GPU-based heterogeneous systems based on a unified OpenCL framework.
• Multi-device parallelization strategies to tackle system heterogeneity.
• The adopted parallelization strategy ensures the quality of the inversion results.
• Performance speedup as high as 30× is obtained with a dual-GPU system.

Seismic inversion is an established approach to model the geophysical characteristics of oil and gas reservoirs, being one of the basis of the decision making process in the oil&gas exploration industry. However, the required accuracy levels can only be attained by dealing and processing significant amounts of data, often leading to consequently long execution times. To overcome this issue and to allow the development of larger and higher resolution elastic models of the subsurface, a novel parallelization approach is herein proposed targeting the exploitation of GPU-based heterogeneous systems based on a unified OpenCL programming framework, to accelerate a state of art Stochastic Seismic Amplitude versus Offset Inversion algorithm. To increase the parallelization opportunities while ensuring model fidelity, the proposed approach is based on a careful and selective relaxation of some spatial dependencies. Furthermore, to take into consideration the heterogeneity of modern computing systems, usually composed of several and different accelerating devices, multi-device parallelization strategies are also proposed. When executed in a dual-GPU system, the proposed approach allows reducing the execution time in up to 30 times, without compromising the quality of the obtained models.