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Increasing the Expert "Bandwidth"
Special to SEG Show Daily By Bill Bartling This article first appeared in the 2004 Society of Exploration Geophysicists Hart's Show Daily, published by Hart Energy Publishing and reprinted with permission. As oil deposits grow ever more difficult to find and produce, geoscientists analyze larger quantities of data in hopes of locating previously overlooked reserves, as well as tapping known reserves to their fullest. In this new era, the ability to squeeze more information out of raw data can be key to major discoveries-enabling geophysicists to "see" underground and model the location, shape and distribution of suspected oil reservoirs.
The key to such data analysis is balanced information technology systems and the "collaborative visualization environment," which has grown in popularity with the advent of 3D seismic volumes. These massive datasets are subject to a litany of calculations, designed to produce rock and fluid properties. With the right combination of hardware and software, the attributes are calculated "on the fly," making for a highly interactive environment. This then leads to better decision-making because geophysicists can analyze far more data. Indeed, the expert's "bandwidth" has increased dramatically over the last 10 years, from a historic norm of 800KB/month to today's standard 100GB/month - a stunning 100,000-fold increase in the rate that an expert can visually analyze data, outrunning Moore's Law by nearly 1000 times New sensing technology, including fiber optic arrays and wireless battery-powered sensors will only increase the data onslaught delivering unprecedented volumes and rates of data at the interpreter's digital doorstep. But there is still a limit on how much of this data can be interactively viewed and analyzed at once. Even the fastest computer systems can only process so much data. If the complete dataset for a project is large but the processing is slow, the effect is like viewing a vast landscape through a narrow straw: it is all there, but difficult to piece together and interpret. Meeting the challenge to deliver larger and larger data to the interpreting geoscientist, a new hurdle has been cleared, visualizing and interacting with more than 400GB of seismic data for the first time. Collaboration between Marathon Oil Company, Silicon Graphics and Landmark Graphics created this new capability, decimating the previous world record of less than 100 gigabytes. These unprecedented levels are far larger than those typically processed on PC-based systems, which usually handle less than 2 gigabytes. This test was conducted using an Silicon Graphics® Onyx4™ visualization system with 64 processors, 4 graphics processing units, and 512 GB system memory, with Landmark Graphic's 64-bit interactive interpretation GeoProbe® application. Marathon's latest major discoveries have been made in offshore locations, where data analysis is critical. By expanding Marathon's ability to visualize data to at least 400 gigabytes, a greater region can be roamed and viewed, using additional rock and fluid properties to give fresh insight into the details of underground rock formations. This also allows for trends to be highlighted that might otherwise have been missed when geophysicists are forced to view the same data in much smaller-sized sessions. Bill Bartling is Senior Director of Market Strategy for SGI, responsible for SGI's strategy and position in the oil and gas industry. 
Image courtesy of Landmark Graphics. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
