Synthetic Seismic Dataset

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The Synthetic Seismic Dataset (SSD) project is part of the DOE gas and oil national information infrastructure program. The goal of the project is to generate a seismic dataset that will be used to calibrate industrial seismic analysis codes. There are several government, as well as industrial, participants in the project. The U.S. government participants are, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The project is coordinated by the Society of Exploration Geophysicists . The French Institute Francais du Petrole is also a participant and software contributor.

Project Description

Seismic analysis codes are used to predict geological features based on the reflection and propagation of acoustic waves through the ground. An array of receivers will be distributed on an area to be investigated and a series source signals generated. The time histories gathered by the receivers can be analyzed and, based on known properties of sound speed through different media, an estimate of the subteranian formation can be constructed. This process is known as the inverse problem. The analysis of the time histories is done by computer. The programs used to do the analysis are seismic analysis codes. Until recently the calibration of these codes has been impractical because it would mean examining several cubic kilometers of earth to determine the true structure and comparing it to the predicted structure.

The SSD project will provide a more economical means to calibrate the seismic analysis codes. In this project we computationally simulate a seismic survey. The geological features are known in advance. We perform the seismic survey on the computer by simulating the propagation of the acoustic waves through the feature. Data are collected on a receiver array and stored for future use. The idea is to use the computationally generated time histories to predict the know geological feature with the seismic analysis codes.

Oak Ridge Involvement

The involvement of the national laboratories in this project is to provide parallel processing expertise and computational cycles to generate portions of the dataset. This will be done for two geological models. These models were designed by the SEG modeling committee . The models represent a salt dome and an overthrust formation. At Oak Ridge, the code has been ported to the Intel Paragon that is operated by the Center for Computational Science. Please refer to the following list for details of various aspects of the computation.

Details

Mathematics> - Math aspects of the calculation.
Computer Science - Parallel processing issues, performance, etc.
Graphics - Visuals of the results of the computation.
Collaborators - Links to other key collaborators in the project.
Results - Download results datasets.

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WAYS TO CONTACT

http://www.epm.ornl.gov/~semeraro/
Oak Ridge National Laboratory / (semeraro@msr.epm.ornl.gov)
Last Modified June 26, 1995