Practical Runs

What are the costs of running No-Compromise 3D Seismic Modeling?

A rough estimate of the hardware costs of modeling a shot is about $0.15 per shot hardware cost, assuming 30Hz, 3,000 meter aperture, 10,000 meter depth, typical land velocities, $8 per computer per day cost.

Although our implementation of finite difference modeling is significantly cheaper than older conventional implementations, this process is still not cheap. Whereas this process used to cost perhaps $2 million of compute hardware time to simulate a large seismic survey with expensive parameters, it may now cost $100,000. However, the realism of this process is crucial for reliable results.

The cost will vary greatly by the parameters of your modeling. Key parameters are:

• Maximum frequency to model
• Number of shots
• Aperture
• Depth of model
• Characteristics of your velocity model
• Your hardware costs

No-Compromise 3D Seismic Modeling is designed to run on standard 2-8 core Intel/AMD computers with 4-8 gigabytes of memory. These are standard computers that you can use for other applications in your cluster. If purchasing in volumes of 32-64 computers, this hardware should cost about $4,000 per computer.