Landmark wants to move seismic processing from the processing center to the desktop. It is to achieve this with a complete re-write of its ProMax seismic processing software. The new software will be web-enabled, and re-packaged as “SeisSpace.”
Troop
Geoff Troop, speaking at the Landmark London City Forum explained that web-enabling seismic processing will give the interpreter access to compute intensive processing. SeisSpace turns the desktop into a virtual processing center and will offer access to pre-stack attributes such as AVO and gathers. SeisSpace will leverage Linux/UNIX/Intel clusters – offering, according to Troop, “a much lower
$/Flop ratio.” SeisSpace will also benefit from centralized data management and compute resources. SeisSpace Release 1.0, running on Sun or Linux clusters is currently in alpha test and is being benchmarked by Chevron. A Microsoft Explorer look and feel offers a split panel view of projects, lines and ‘flows’ – i.e. processing workflows. Processes can be executed remotely, or on the local machine.
Parallel
Troop claims that SeisSpace has been written from scratch for a parallel processing environment and will offer linear scalability (performance increases linearly with the number of available CPU nodes.)
E-Collar
An embedded “E-Collar” means that each seismic processing element gets a unique URL – so that in the future the exact processing sequence for any data element can be retrieved for view or re-activation. This technique allows the dataset’s history to be contained within the trace header. SeisSpace is said to manage low bandwidth environments via data compression and queuing strategies. An ‘open’ development platform allows for proprietary processing algorithms to be incorporated.
ProMax
On the marketing front, Troop recognizes ProMax’s strength ‘in exploration,’ and says that SeisSpace will ‘complement ProMax in development and production.’ Pressed on this, Troop denied that there were any plans to drop ProMax – which has a ‘46% market share in desktop seismic processing.’ But while there maybe no plans to drop ProMax in the medium term, it seems unlikely that Landmark will maintain two seismic processing suites indefinitely. SeisSpace V1.0 is due for release towards the end of 2001. It will offer 3D pre-processing, stack, and pre-stack time migration of massive data volumes, AVO and ad-hoc attribute analysis.
Note that in the old days, a technique like the E-Collar might have been submitted to the SEG as a proposed standard – but in the cut and thrust world of e-business, Landmark has opted for a patent instead!
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