JV article: Vorticity speeds up mineral discoveries with geophysics software

Mineral exploration has relied on slow, outdated computing for decades to analyze geophysical data. While other industries have advanced, prospecting has lagged behind, hampered by inefficient software and limited processing power.

Now, California-based Vorticity is changing that. The cutting-edge computer company in Redwood City, the heart of Silicon Valley, creates high-speed solutions to process vast amounts of data.

Founded in 2019, Vorticity tackles the challenge of businesses whose investing in hardware hasn’t achieved substantial performance gains. Its solution: tailored software and hardware unlocking maximum computing speed and return on investment on high-end infrastructure.

One of Vorticity’s most notable contributions is its inversion portal, a powerful cloud-based platform that enables geophysicists to process large-scale geophysical survey data at top speeds.

“An inversion portal is an online platform where geophysicists and other users can process and create models from their data,” Paul Köttering, project lead at Vorticity, said in an interview. “We have developed a way to [create those models] really fast, in the cloud, and on a large scale.”

Accurate models

Traditionally, scientists rely on inversion techniques, which are like puzzle-solving. They gather scattered metrics and use them to create an underground map.

Imagine you’re looking for treasure buried deep underground. You have a metal detector, but instead of instantly telling you where the gold is, it gives you a bunch of signals that need to be analyzed. Normally, experts would take two to six weeks to process this data and create a map of what’s below the surface. Current computers can’t efficiently handle the enormous amount of calculations needed.

Vorticity’s turns the weeks into hours, making the search for underground resources faster, more precise and far less expensive. Instead of using thousands of regular computer chips (which would take over 100,000 computer processing unit cores for large projects), they use specialized processors and parallel computing. Many calculations occur simultaneously rather than one after another.

Traditional mineral exploration can take up to a decade to determine whether a deposit is viable. With Vorticity’s inversion portal, companies can streamline their workflow, improve data quality and make more informed decisions quickly. This can save time and money.

Industry upgrade

Vorticity CEO Chirath Neranjena, who has a background in theoretical physics and engineering, saw an opportunity when he started the company.  

“Mineral exploration hasn’t really kept up with modern technological advancements,” the CEO said. “There’s a little bit more uptake from some of the oil and gas companies, but minerals are about 10 years behind.”

Vorticity has taken advantage of graphics processing chips and rewritten the software for them. That’s allowed people to extract a higher amount of data and use more sophisticated models in significantly faster time. They’re the same chips powering the AI revolution.

“Allowing people to have access to these fast computers will reduce timelines, which is really what we want to do,” Köttering said.  “If you’re doing any sort of geophysics you need to be doing inversions.”

Vorticity is backed by some of Silicon Valley’s most cutting-edge investors, including Cambium Capital, Dolby Family Ventures and Moore Strategic Ventures.

"When you give other industries access to faster and cheaper computation, using their own industry-specific knowledge, they can do really cool things,” Köttering said.

Astrape system

The company’s flagship system for the mineral exploration community, Astrape, is specifically designed for geophysical analysis, helping companies find valuable underground resources like minerals, oil and gas.

Astrape focuses on airborne electromagnetic surveys, enabling users to perform both 2-D and 3-D inversions for comprehensive subsurface analysis. Astrape can process data in hours instead of weeks, producing clearer, more detailed underground maps.

Then there is Rhea, which assists in creating detailed subsurface images crucial for geophysical explorations in the energy industry. It enables scientific research and high-security applications.

Vorticity’s Plutus platform, for financial companies, provides rapid pricing options to assist traders and analysts. There is also Asclepius, which simulates molecular interactions, benefiting research in chemistry, biology and materials science.

Vorticity plans to release even faster custom-built computer chips that will outperform current technology by as much as 10 times, the project leader said.

“When you give these people efficient and inexpensive access to better computational power, they use their own expertise to improve the way they do things and revolutionize their own industries.”

The preceding Joint Venture Article is PROMOTED CONTENT sponsored by Vorticity and produced in co-operation with The Northern Miner. Visit: www.vorticity.xyz for more information.