The Offshore Technology Conference broke new ground this year by initialing live data manipulation during oral presentations. For years the standard technical talk has been augmented by film slides or PowerPoint presentations. This year IBM provided a Linux cluster to host 3D seismic data sets, software, and associated data layers so that authors could demonstrate the workflows that led to their conclusions.

The Petrotechnical Visualization sessions covered mud line to deep reservoir analysis, demonstrating the usefulness of different analysis packages and how they could be integrated to solve interpretation problems.

Graham Kent of the University of California-San Diego described the next step in manipulating the growing datasets required by the oil industry. By combining optical networking, Internet protocol, and computer storage, he and his team are working to create the OptIPuter.

This computer architecture concept will separate the component parts of the computer system: CPU, memory, graphic engines, and storage, but connect them using the installed base of fiber optic cables that now are "dark" and little used. By using many light frequencies along a single optical fiber the "Lambdagrid" can overcome the bandwidth bottleneck that forces geophysical interpreters to decimate their datasets down to a capacity that their equipment can easily process. This decimation increases current project throughput, but limits the detail available for analysis.

An OptIPuter would increase bandwith up to 18.2 GB/sec and allow widely distributed storage volumes containing major data sets to be accessed and utilized. This would increase real-time access to extra-large data stores, including time series images and scenes; it would allow visualization and collaboration with enhanced detail, and improve performance.

05/03/04