Nick Purday gave Oil IT Journal a demo of Landmark’s new interpretation flagship, the Decision Space Desktop (DSD). DSD is a ‘unified workspace’ for upstream interpretation. The DSD environment comprises an OpenWorks database and a suite of tools for visualization and workflow management. Currently three major applications plug-in to the base framework—for seismic interpretation (derived from SeisWorks), model building( from Earth Model) and a new geological interpretation package, developed in collaboration with Statoil. A fourth application is being integrated into DSD—the AssetView well planning environment. Other tools will follow—although not, as we understand, GeoProbe, whose functionality will ultimately be embedded in other DSD applications.
DSD is marketed as a ‘collaboration’ platform for the asset team. Multi-user access to a common database benefits from standard OpenWorks/Oracle transaction management. Workflow control is stored in an XML file which, in a future release, will allow for re-play and batch execution of parameterized jobs.
Our demo began with basin-scale interpretation of geo-referenced sketch maps and cross sections in one window. Cultural data in the form of ESRI ArcMap files can be viewed live from the database—a future DSD release will have a bi-directional link to ESRI. New ‘geo-shaper’ technology allows for stratigraphic units to be defined and interpretation history—who did what and when—is also stored in OpenWorks.
Interpretation proceeds with the creation of a sealed model leveraging the Shapes topology engine that Landmark acquired from GeoSmith in 2007. Well data defined events can be incorporated into the model using the conformance modeling technology originally developed in Geographix’ cross section tools. Property modeling leverages the Isatis geostatistical engine—thanks to an ‘exclusive’ relationship with Geovariances. Non-sequential methods can be multi-threaded, benefitting from modern multi core architectures. For non specialist users, DSD exposes ‘off-the-shelf’ workflows—such as a ‘west Permian basin carbonate’ play. Experienced geostatisticians have the option to tweak their own variograms.
DSD generates vertical (as opposed to pillar) grids. The gridding was developed by Halliburton and aligned with the simulator group. Gridding can create a VDB file for Nexus or write out Rescue formatted data for Eclipse and other tools. The next release will include simulator post processing and visualization.
DSD runs on Red Hat Linux and porting to Windows is underway, leveraging Landmark’s investment in Java, alongside Nokia’s Qt. This leaves the Halliburton engineering data model (EDM) toolset outside of DSD’s immediate scope—although data connectors are available. Early tests show performance on Windows to be ‘equivalent’ to Linux although no benchmarks were available. Purday commented, ‘There is no rush to Windows—most customers are happy with Linux. Some major accounts won’t leave Linux because of Windows’ security issues.’
Our demo benefitted from a very high end display—an 8 megapixel, 4 x HD Barco screen driven by dual Nvidia PCI 16 graphics cards. Plenty of monitor real estate is required to get the maximum use of DSD’s component apps. In fact, DSD is really more of a ‘workstation’ than a ‘desktop’ if such a distinction can be made these days. More from www.oilit.com/links/1010_2.
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