Speaking at the 2011 Schlumberger Ocean user group held recently in Houston, Evgeny Lykhin showed off the new Microsoft ‘Fluent,’ a.k.a. ‘ribbon’ interface along with other usability enhancements to the dev kit for Petrel, Schlumberger’s software flagship. The Ocean framework has been bolstered with unit tests for plug-in ‘sanity,’ an ‘on-demand data loading option and more control over software licensing. Ocean now offers a stratigraphy API and more flexible custom plots for charts and map views. A new seismic attribute control improves interaction and a ‘virtual cropped volume’ API provides custom ‘probe’ volume functionality. 2D and pre-stack data can now both be displayed and manipulated through the Ocean API—including write back of pre-stack to disk.
Ashley Kelham (Rock Deformation Research) gave a straight-talking presentation of real-world Ocean development, sharing some of RDR’s best practices for getting the most from the Ocean API. Ocean is a highly specialized environment used by many from a non programming background. Such folks tend to use the API like a ‘first class member’ of the C# language. The reality is that while Ocean hides a lot of complexity, developers should not assume the API is always ‘correct.’ Ocean does not have tens of thousands of active users like mainstream development tools who iron out defects. Moreover Schlumberger’s rate of change makes it ‘almost impossible’ to be sure what is stable.
Kelham recommends checking that the API ‘does what you expect’ and to enclose questionable API calls in a try/catch block. Performance is enhanced by treating API calls as if they were network calls, avoiding use inside loops and favoring ‘chunky’ over ‘chatty’ communications. To protect itself from Schlumberger’s frenetic release schedule, RDR wraps Ocean calls in its own classes to minimize code changes and ensure ‘efficient and stable code.’
Paul Schatz presented INT’s.Net GeoToolkit which powers Petrel’s new integrated 2D Windows environment. The first deliverable is the 2011.1 well section window. INT is working with Schlumberger to re-develop the multi-well view with support for OpenInventor and GPU-accelerated rendering. Albert Lu described how compute-intense applications benefit from parallelization with the Managed ThreadPool API and Microsoft’s parallel extensions for.NET 3.5. Although there are some potential pitfalls with threading overhead, possible deadlocks and limited speed up scalability. Clay Burch presented Syncfusion’s.NET controls which offer a range of user interface, data management and reporting components for most all Windows platforms. More from www.oilit.com/links/1111_24. Read the presentations from the 2011 Ocean User Group on—www.oilit.com/links/1111_25.
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