Nvidia claims Tesla will open up China

BEIJING, CHINA – A Californian graphics chip company claims that a collaboration with a Chinese geophysical services provider will transform the oil and gas industry in China.

Nvidia said GeoStar has a seismic software suite that in combination with its Tesla graphics processing unit will speed up the search for oil deposits.

According to Nvidia, the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has spent months testing its Tesla GPUs with the GeoStar software.

Nvidia claims that shows that 24 Tesla GPUs processed 740 square kilometres of data 600 times faster than a cluster using 66 CPUs.

It’s not just oil and gas. The massively parallel CUDA architecture using Tesla chips is changing the face of other industries too. But in the oil and gas industries this change is “profound”.

Nvidia rehearses this argument. Power consumption for running and cooling servers in data centers is a major portion of operational expenses. But its GPU based cluster give much higher performance than CPU only clusters.

We guess Intel would have something to say about this argument.