UNIRAS USER GROUP 1999

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UNIRAS USER GROUP 1999

• Using Toolmaster/AGX in
• Seismic Oil Exploration
• Stuart Merrylees
• ROBERTSON RESEARCH INTERNATIONAL
• GEOPHYSICS DIVISION
• Swanley, KENT
• Email shm_at_geo.robresint.co.uk
• Tel [phone]

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OUR BUSINESS...

• We process seismic reflection data to explore for
  oil and gas.
• Contracts won by competitive tender
• terabytes of data
• standard and proprietary algorithms
• lots of computing
• and lots of graphics
• Develop software
• 2 million lines of Fortran and C.

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INPUT DATA

• Raw seismic signals on magnetic tape
• Coordinates and maps of survey location
• Well data, historic data, in any format.
• Clients objectives for this survey
• Our own expertise and historic knowldege

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• QC of seismic acquisition
• Interactive tools to explore data
• Hardcopy with lots of annotation.

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DELIVERABLES

• QC plots of experimental diagnostics.
• SEISMIC SECTIONS on paper and film
• very high quality plot - complex annotation
• Magnetic tape of final digital data.
• CGM files on CD ROM
• Written report with illustrations
• various Microsoft files...

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OUR TOOLS.

• UNISEIS - Proprietary software
• Fortran, C, X, Motif, awk, perl, xmgr
• Metrica UNIX database
• UNIRAS AGX and Widgets, AVS Express
• C tree from FAIRCOM
• PROMAX interactive seismic processing
• creates CGM with SDI
• favours SDI or ZEH interpreters

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Geoqube matching

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OUR HARDWARE

• HP HPUX 10.20 and HPUX 11.0
• PA RISC 2.0 N class (8 x PA8500)
• PA RISC 2.0 J class, K class
• PA RISC 1.0 735
• IBM RS6000 AIX 4.3, AIX 4.2, AIX 3.2.5
• F50 (4 CPU)
• 390, 390, 580, 530
• Raid, Tapes - 3480, 3490, 3590, DLT, DAT

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DISPLAY DEVICES

• OYO Thermal plotters, 24/36 in 200/400 dpi
• Versatec interface (CGM, or RDB metafiles).
• HP 650C Design Jet Colour plotter - HPRTL
• Xerox B/W paper plotter - HPRTL
• LASERDOT Film plotter. 42in 800dpi raster
• OCE Scanner/Film Plotter - HPRTL
• Postscript printers, A3 and A4.
• X terminals 1280 x 1024 resolution.
• Microsoft exchange - tif and gif, etc.

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WHY WE CHOSE AGX

• AGX Toolmaster, Widgets and UIM/X
• Purchased 1992, after comparative benchmarks.
• Licenses development and 12 run-time.
• Versatile - seismic, contours, 3D, widgets.
• Lots of hardcopy devices configurable.
• Authorities on CGM - committee members.
• Uses UIM/X GUI builder.
• Available on all our favourite UNIX platforms.
• Well documented. Good UK support.

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OUR APPLICATIONS

• 4 developed with UIM/X GUI builder
• 8 batch (or command-line) applications
• 3 applications written in pure X and Motif
• DESIGN CRITERIA...
• Write as few applications as possible !
• Can it interact with, or complement, other tools
  ?
• Interactive and batch modes of operation
• How will it read ( write ? ) its data ?
• Will it be fast enough ?
• Hardcopy - scaling options - more annotation.

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MPL Toolkit
Fortran program Read data traces
Write to socket
TUX and AGX C executable. Plots traces
and starts analyses.
Write to socket
TUX and AGX C executable. Spectral Analysis
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WHICH AGX RELEASE ?

• AGX Releases
• 6v5a is our current production release.
• Plus some special fixes.
• Some applications still need to use 6v3b or 6v4a.
• 7v0 - creates more portable CGM format
• but new bugs (and no fixes) - not generally
  usable
• 7v1 - we were a BETA test site
• we think it failed.

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Research programmer created diagnostic of 150
identical traces, to test an algorithm. He saw
strange effects he did not expect. He plotted
the original data and got a surprise...

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Adding noise here ...
The original data

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Problem may disappear when you zoom ...
changes data character here
Can you trust your tools ?
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GRIDPLOT Map of velocity of sound over seismic
structure in 3D survey. One of many slices of
data on a rectangular grid.

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GRIDPLOT PROGRAM

• Display any XY grid with various Z attributes.
• Signal/Noise level in raw recordings
• 3D binning maps, Line intersection/Navigation
  QC.
• Seismic velocity maps, Timeslices from 3D cube.
  
• Define COMPACT data format
• binary data with ascii descriptor headers.
• AGX GRIDS and CONTOURS
• Menus to control scaling, colours, contour levels
• Options to combine Z attributes, ZOOM, ROTATE
• HARDCOPY - Postscript, CGM, HPTRL, etc

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CGM - a picture-archive format

• Extensions CGM, CGM-PIP supported in AGX
  manuals - but not by AGX code.
• CGM allows mixed integer precision 16, 24, 32,
  64 bit Floats can be IEEE, or
  hybrid formats - leads to chaos.
• Not complete, eg font name but no font
  description.
• CGM is not really device independent.
• Other vendors CGM generators and interpreters
  may paint different pictures - or no picture at
  all !
• AGX Profile system intended to correct for these
  deficiencies but parameters are all trial and
  error.

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CGM - where next ?

• agX/CGM Users Guide, 6v4a, 1994.
  An excellent manual and
  tutorial.
• Oil industry (POSC) has defined reasonable subset
  of CGM
• UNIRAS had 90 of an excellent product and has
  let it drift away - has it lost interest ?
• Profile keywords have new names and new
  parameters.
• VDCTYPE (real, integer)
• SEISMIC_EXTENSIONS (none, cgm_plus, cgm_pip)
• MCGM_RESOLUTION ( npixel)
• INTPREC_BIN (16, 24, 32)
• Suggest conform to PIP definition, with one
  simple keyword.
• Suggest add HERSHEY to available fonts

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NEW RELEASES

• New Release arrives...
• Not a lot of new features in Release Notes, but
• they never tell us what has changed....
• Recompile and test all our applications
• Try to debug things that fail.
• Go back to original /examples/agx/ source code to
  try to replicate problem.
• Takes some effort - wait for response
• May never succeed - no debug tools - we are
  stuck.
• AVS Website still says 7v0 is current release ?

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Maintenance experiences

• SEISPLOT bugs February 1997
• Robertson demonstrated problems in 6v4a/6v5a.
• applications crashed plots distorted and
  irregular.
• fixes for 6v5a provided - but not in next
  release !
• CGM format incompatible with other vendors.
• Partly resolved by using 7v0 for CGM creation.
• But it still crashes.
• 7v0 release had several new bugs.
• 7v1 release had more new bugs.

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OUR WISH LIST

• Provide test programs which exercise all the
  features in all the AGX routines.
• Always put fixes into next release.
• Re-establish support for CGM. Document
  UNIRAS.PRF profiles.
• Update Website. Offer online documentation.
• Dispense with shareable object libraries.
• Support latest HP architecture and OS.
• Supply UIM/X license instead of TUX license.