3-D prestack Kirchhoff depth migration: From prototype to production in a massively parallel processor environment

Portable, production-scale 3-D prestack Kirchhoff depth migration software capable of full-volume imaging has been successfully implemented and applied to a six-million trace (46.9 Gbyte) marine data set from a salt/subsalt play in the Gulf of Mexico. Velocity model building and updates use an image-driven strategy and were performed in a Sun Spare environment. Images obtained by 3-D prestack migration after three velocity iterations are substantially better focused and reveal drilling targets that were not visible in images obtained from conventional 3-D poststack time migration. Amplitudes are well preserved, so anomalies associated with known reservoirs conform to the petrophysical predictions. Prototype development was on an 8-node Intel iPSC860 computer; the production version was run on an 1824-node Intel Paragon computer. The code has been successfully ported to GRAY (T3D) and Unix workstation (PVM) environments.