AxWAVE™

Acceleware has developed AxWAVE™, a high performance finite-difference seismic forward modelling solution used for the simulation of seismic wave propagation through the subsurface. This application enables a fast and accurate simulation of 2D and 3D seismic energy in an acoustic medium. AxWAVE uses the same finite-difference two-way wave propagation engine that powers Acceleware’s Reverse Time Migration solution, AxRTM™, and is optimized for modern high performance computing platforms including NVIDIA GPUs, multi-core CPUs, and Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors. AxWAVE is used in seismic forward modelling applications to generate synthetic shot gathers over complicated subsurface structures. The wave propagation engine accurately models acoustic wave behavior, so the resulting shot gathers contain direct arrivals, primaries, surface multiples, and interbed multiples. This simulation process closely emulates acquired field data. Companies can therefore benefit from predicting and validating before investing, reducing costs and improving confidence in decision making. Seismic Forward Modelling can be used in different applications: In seismic acquisition survey design, seismic forward modeling reduces the risk in seismic exploration by providing quantitative information for better designing 3D acquisition geometries. The forward modelling process can also generate illumination maps to visualize the subsurface seismic energy distribution. For seismic survey designers, both the shot gathers and the illumination maps are useful for evaluating alternative seismic survey geometries and the target zone coverage in a proposed survey. Survey designers can then optimize acquisition geometries to improve the quality of their surveys. The figure below is a screenshot of the AxWAVE Graphical User Interface (GUI). The easy to use GUI includes a parameters window (on the left) and a survey selection window (on the right). The survey selection window provides a visualization of the survey as it is being built. Users can also hover the mouse over a shot to view the coordinates and highlight select shots to run separately. The parameters window provides users with a simple point and click solution to set the parameter specifications, upload velocity models and configure the survey geometry.