Accelerating Multi-attribute Unsupervised Seismic Facies Analysis With RAPIDS

Abstract: Classification of seismic facies is done by clustering seismic data samples based on their attributes. Year after year, 3D datasets used by exploration geophysics increase in size, complexity, and number of attributes, requiring a continuous rise in the classification performance. In this work, we explore the use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to perform the classification of seismic surveys using the well-established Machine Learning (ML) method k-means. We show that the high-performance distributed implementation of the k-means algorithm available at the RAPIDS library can be used to classify facies in large seismic datasets much faster than a classical parallel CPU implementation (up to 258-fold faster in NVIDIA V100 GPUs), especially for large seismic blocks. We tested the algorithm with different real seismic volumes, including Netherlands, Parihaka, and Kahu (from 12GB to 66GB).