Accelerating subsurface offset gathers for 3D seismic applications using FPGAs

Oliver Pell and Robert G. Clapp

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ABSTRACT

For shot profile migration construction of subsurface offset gathers can be the dominant cost. By implementing the subsurface offset gather computation on a MAX-1 accelerator card with a Xilinx Virtex-4 Field Programable Gate Array (FPGA), we obtain 20x speed-up over a state-of-the-art Opteron system. By reducing data precision further speed-up can be achieved, at minimal image degradagation.