UNIRAS USER GROUP 1999

Using Toolmaster/AGX inSeismic Oil Exploration

Stuart Merrylees

ROBERTSON RESEARCH INTERNATIONALGEOPHYSICS DIVISION

Swanley, KENT

Email shm@geo.robresint.co.ukTel 01322 668011

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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….

INPUT DATA

Raw seismic signals on magnetic tape

Coordinates and maps of survey location

Well data, historic data, in any format….

Client’s objectives for this survey Our own expertise and historic knowldege

• QC of seismic acquisition

• Interactive tools to explore data

• Hardcopy with lots of annotation.

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...

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

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

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.

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.

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

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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Can you trust your tools ?

Adding noise here ...

Problem may disappear when you zoom ...

changes data character here

The original data

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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.

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

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 vendor’s 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.

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

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 ?

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.

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.