Don't blink. If you do, you might miss an entire generation of visualization technology.

OK, maybe it's not quite that dramatic. But a revolution in the computer hardware industry is enabling visualization in the oilpatch to progress in ways we never even imagined.

Visualization technology has always been on the "gee whiz" end of oil and gas technology. In the late '90s companies like Statoil and BP spent millions of dollars installing large visual reality centers and smaller "caves" in which asset teams could join together, examine the same volume of data in three dimensions and collaborate on decisions. It was, and still is, a great idea.

But it's not a one-size-fits-all solution. Smaller companies can't afford to spend the money it takes to install a state-of-the-art visualization theater, and those companies that have done so have found that the theaters aren't always used as anticipated. They still can't solve the age-old oilfield problem of needing all of the experts in one place at one time. And while some companies have experimented with remote visualization, they're often limited by bandwidth issues.

Wouldn't it be great, companies have murmured, if interpreters could have the same 3-D visualization capabilities on their desktops? After all, in the case of seismic data interpretation, that's where they spend most of their time. Until now that's been easier said than done. Seismic interpretation in a 3-D visualization mode requires volume rendering, a massively compute-intense process that would make desktop computers of the past nervous even thinking about it. But an unlikely savior - the computer gaming market - has come to the rescue, as has the Linux operating system and the new 64-bit architecture being offered in modern processors. The combination of these ingredients is resulting in a powerful new way to visualize volumes on the desktop that costs considerably less than solutions of the past.

A processing revolution

Those who have followed information technology (IT) for any time at all will know that 64-bit architecture is not a particularly new concept. What makes it important today is that processor manufacturers have embraced the concept of making their 64-bit processors compatible with existing 32-bit processors so that companies that purchase the new processors won't have to completely overhaul their systems.
According to Douglas O'Flaherty, division manager HPC for AMD, previous iterations of 64-bit systems "required companies to change the way they work. With the new architecture, the independent software vendors and geophysical contractors don't have to go through an extensive process to port their data to the new system. It's infinitely less painful."

New systems such as the Opteron processor offered by AMD "work the way you do," he added. "It can run your visualization software, but it can also run your e-mail."

Graphics cards are helping to lead the way in this revolution as well, and some are so powerful that part of the processing can actually be done on the graphics card. "The graphics boards are doubling in performance in less than a year," said Huw James, chief designer of interpretation solutions for Paradigm Geophysical. "That's created dramatic improvements."

But the needs of a seismic interpreter are different than those of a teen-ager playing a video game, and companies are responding by providing solutions that are geared specifically to volume rendering. One of these is TeraRecon Inc., which offers a specialized board called VolumePro to do volume rendering on the desktop. "Graphics cards are great for 3-D surfaces, but they're not at all well suited for volume rendering," said Frank Baker, director of VolumePro sales for TeraRecon. "People want to move around inside enormous amounts of seismic data quickly and with superior image quality on inexpensive platforms, and that is extremely difficult to do even with today's high-performance graphics cards. VolumePro works with the graphics card to provide a solution."

What makes companies like TeraRecon different is that their solutions are not cost-prohibitive. Due to the Linux operating system, commodity-priced chips and graphics cards can be used to perform feats that only high-end technology could manage a few years ago. "When we first started demonstrating VolumePro, people would say things like, 'I don't understand what you're doing that is so special. I've been doing this for a number of years,'" Baker said. "But they were doing it on US $500,000 worth of equipment, and we had a $12,000 computer doing the same thing."

Another company enabling the move to less expensive platforms is Mercury Computer Systems Inc. Mercury offers Open Inventor from Mercury, a graphics toolkit that is cross-platform and allows extremely large datasets to be viewed on inexpensive computers. According to Bill Henderson, part of Mercury's 3-D visualization group, the company's display at the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) annual meeting last October got some attention.

"We have a new application, VolumeViz, and what we showed at SEG was an 80-gigavoxel dataset that you can interact with in real time on a standard workstation with 2 gigabytes of memory," Henderson said. "That's pretty much unheard of at this point."

Larger hardware vendors are not being left behind. SGI unveiled Prism at SEG, a computing system that borrows from the cluster computing approach but also from the supercomputer concept to present a Linux-based visual computing system that combines standards-based Intel Itanium 2 processors with Transitive Corp.'s QuickTransit technology, allowing software applications compiled for one processor and operating system to run on another without source code or binary changes. Unlike cluster computing systems, Prism only requires one copy of Linux, fewer graphics cards and a single shared-memory system, and it utilizes SGI's Numaflex architecture. "Not only is the performance better than a cluster system, but the price point comes down dramatically compared even to the PC-based systems because we only need 10% of the components," said Bill Bartling, senior director of marketing strategy for SGI.
In addition to its legacy SPARC processor-based workstations, Sun Microsystems now offers AMD Opteron processor-based workstations (the Sun Java Workstation W1100z and W2100z) that can handle both 32- and 64-bit applications. Sun recently signed an agreement with NVIDIA to supply its high-end graphics cards for the new Opteron workstations running Linux, Solaris or Windows operating systems. NVIDIA will also be porting the OpenGL graphics library to the Solaris x86 operating environment. Key applications from Landmark Graphics, Paradigm Geophysical and Schlumberger are all available on the new workstations.

Keeping up with the Joneses

For the independent software vendors, these changes are exciting but challenging. Used to offering software that either employs short-cuts to get around clunky computing systems or that contains functionality that is never fully utilized, these companies now must work to keep their systems compatible with the ever-evolving hardware, which in the case of graphics cards can be quite a struggle.
"There's a very short window during which you can actually sell the hardware and software together," James said. "It's happening so quickly that it's a problem. But if you're interested in understanding the complex data, it's a nice problem to have."

In some instances, however, the graphics capabilities are still being outpaced by the datasets. "Brute-force solutions - bigger and faster machines - don't always solve our customers' problems, especially for those users who work on notebooks or just don't have access to high-end visualization hardware," said Eric Schoen, principal architect, Visualization for Schlumberger Information Systems. "Scalable techniques, which allow us to match the problem with the capabilities of the user's machine, have become central to our visualization strategy."

But Schlumberger also has faced the challenge of porting the capabilities of Inside Reality, a virtual reality application, to the desktop. "In a large visualization center, the user controls the system with a tracked wand, and there is no need for keyboard or mouse," Schoen said. "On the desktop version, the user controls a 3-D digitizer that is normally sold as a tool to reverse-engineer small physical objects. Unlike the original version, however, users can also pick menu items with the mouse, which may seem more natural to them."

Certainly it's exciting for these software developers. The ability to take full advantage of their high-end visualization products on the desktop opens vistas of opportunity that most developers could only dream of before. "It will drive a whole new wave of interpretation because for the first time interpreters will be able to have their volume interpretation tools on the desktop with systems that are capable of leveraging the maximum out of the software at a very cost-effective point," said Nick Purday, product manager for GeoProbe at Landmark Graphics. "I think that will speak volumes for adoption of the technology."

Landmark launched a version of GeoProbe 2 years ago that was compatible with Linux 32-bit systems. But limited memory was a problem. With 64-bit Linux, memory problems are much less of an issue.
"With Linux 64-bit, you can have an unlimited volume of random access memory (RAM) on the system," Purday said. "The historical limit for the 32-bit system was around 2 gigabytes. Now we're seeing systems that have 16 gigabytes of memory. That's the tipping point. Two gigabytes was too small, but at 16 gigabytes you're getting pretty close."

The combination of advances is making Murphy's law obsolete. No longer does compute power double every 18 months at the same price; the improvements are orders of magnitude greater than that. "Today we have PCs in the range of $3,000 to $5,000 that are delivering eight times the performance of a $30,000 machine of a few years ago," James said. "When things scale by 10X, it's no longer just faster - you're in a different world."
For software vendors that makes this area "the most competitive rat race in the world," he added. It costs money to upgrade products to run on the better systems, money which is not necessarily recouped because licenses can be reused. "We're not doing this to make money; we're doing it to survive," James said.

But it's obviously not a grueling, tiresome pursuit. Landmark has introduced Combo Mambo, a co-rendering application that leverages gaming technology for performance gains. And developers are keeping a close eye on improvements in display hardware that could further revolutionize the industry.
For instance, said Purday, a company called Panoram is designing wrap-around computer screens that practically turn the desktop into a tiny visualization center. Comprised of three or more screens that can display the same or different images, these types of displays can bring the interpreter into a much more immersive type of environment. Purday said that early adopters have been such diverse groups as the US Department of Homeland Security and lie detector test interpreters, who need to view long strips of data collectively to see the information in context.

Another area of interest is the area between desktop visualization and the larger visualization theater. "I think there's a huge value for asset teams to be having their own visualization center in their workroom," Purday said. "The workroom can move from being a horizontal table with a bunch of paper to a visualization wall where everything is in stereo, they can monitor their fields in real time, it's their facility and they work in it every day."

Mind-blowing as it all can seem, there's more to the new technology than jaw-dropping admiration. "The bottom line is that there is some business value to these technologies; they're not just toys," Purday said. "The more data you can saturate your eyes with and the less time you spend manipulating windows and juggling data, the more productive you will be."

James added, "I tell people I work with that this is the most dramatic area of IT and the seismic business that I can think of. And it's now. It really is the most exciting of times because any time you're in a technology where you're getting 10X performance gains in 3 years or less, you've got to be very quick. You have to be thinking ahead."

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