Showcase: Eclipse in the Oil and Gas Industry

Submitted by David Kyle on Wed, 2008/03/05 - 1:56pm

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I decided to show off some of what we've been working on at Kelman Technologies.

The screen shots show off the IPE (Interactive Processing Environment). It is our latest generation of seismic processing tools based on Eclipse RCP and other Eclipse projects. Before you get your mouse in a knot this isn't a sales pitch. The IPE is not for sale. We use open source tools to turn our intellectual property into tools for "in house" use.

The IPE is the front end to our geophysical processing system. We use it to help our clients find and enhance oil and gas reserves around the world. Developing software for this industry is a challenge because of the immense amount of data that needs to be managed and processed. We deal with extremely large computer clusters, terabyte sized disk farms, exabyte sized tape systems and insane visualization requirements. There are very few industries in the world that have the same high performance computing needs as the oil and gas industry.

Cross plots have been a big challenge. How do you visualize 20 million or more data points? We have tried a number of different scientific plotting libraries that have all failed to handle the large amount of data points. Early 2008 we are starting work on our own plotting library to replace SGT which replaced FreeHEP.

This is what the earth looks like to a geophysicist. A seismic plot can easily be 3 feet by 20 feet long on paper. Convert that to a usable image on the screen and you have a 12,000 by 23,000 pixel image. That is 276,000,000 pixels or about 828 megabytes of memory. Our users expect to have dozens of these images open at one time. Libraries like Java Advanced Imaging were never designed for this sort of work load.

You are seeing seismic data plotted as wiggles and as a variable density plot. Seismic data files can be as large at 350 gigabytes with the requirement that any seismic trace be retrieved for immediate viewing. SWT has been surprising good at keeping up with the performance demands.