#HPC

9 minutes read

When Cray entered the picture, big, heavy and expensive, nothing else quite looked like that. We were no longer talking about a useful computer in the corner of a processing center; we were talking about supercomputers that changed the scale of what CGG could do.

6 minutes read

In our early, pre-computer days, processing teams could get far with curiosity and a bit of trial-and-error — and some did, for a while. But the real change, the point where our work started to look like the industrial, scalable model we rely on at Viridien today, came when the Perkin-Elmer machines showed up in the late 1970s: 32-bit minicomputers with early integrated circuits, replacing earlier digital systems built on discrete transistors and small-scale integration, which had in turn succeeded the analog equipment of the 1950s.

4 minutes read

Before HPC had a name, we were already exploring the Earth. When people ask Laurent Clerc where Viridien’s computing story began, he doesn’t start with Cray supercomputers or GPU clusters. He starts in the desert, with stories told to me by retiring old-timers when I joined the company, then called CGG, more than 35 years ago.