Showcase: Eclipse in the Oil and Gas Industry

Kismet jobs can report errors and warning. We have our own kismet builder/nature. We get the best of the Eclipse IDE for our users who have no programming experience. Editor user assistance, hover help, and other great built in features makes it the editor of choice.

We used iBatis to access our PostgreSQL job tracker server. It's an unorthodox use of iBatis (the IPE is not web based) but it makes for a fast development cycle and easy maintenance. Our users can monitor a job on any cluster computer from the comfort of their desk.

For those times when our client sends us data in a mystery format with no file extension. We can load any binary file into our binary editor. We even have an ascii table view to help with conversions from hex to octal to decimal to ascii. I wonder if we'll need a slider ruler view?

Another sore point I have with the available image libraries. The seismic industry image standard is TIFF on steroids. We can't load a typical TIFF image into an SWT Image object because it will use over 2 gigabytes of memory. We're still working out performance kinks on this one. I'll be looking at Batik and libTiff in 2008. The SWT TIFF support wasn't designed with us in mind.

Our front end to the Portable Batch System (PBS) developed by NASA back in the early 1990s.

We use PBS to manage our computer clusters. Users can submit hundreds or thousands of processing jobs with a simple click of a button. It's grid computing on steroids.

The processing requirements vary depending on the state of the seismic data. We still have to manually configure our computers for peek performance. That is why we have so many different processing queues. I know it sounds like we're in the age of ENIAC but we still haven't found computer hardware that is flexible enough to handle all our high performance processing needs. Heck, we're looking at moving our processing system onto GeForce graphics cards to squeeze out every last FLOP.

Job, jobs and more jobs. Managing thousands of jobs that could run for weeks is getting easier. Using an Eclipse view to filter and sort jobs has made life a little less stressful for our users. More advanced tools are in the works for 2008 and 2009 as we try to figure out better ways for our cluster computers to manage themselves.

Bless the wiki. We use it more and more to keep our internal users informed. The Eclipse platform allows us to search our internal doc, our wiki, and our Eclipse based info center with the click of one button. It's great.

We are pushing the Eclipse RCP to extremes that I know were never envisioned by the Eclipse team back in the 2001. Although we've found a few performance weaknesses we've never regretted our decision to adopt Eclipse RCP.