News of the month

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Convention time!

Next week is Canada's annual petroleum geoscience party, the CSPG–CSEG–CWLS GeoConvention. Thousands of applied geoscientists will descend on Calgary's downtown Telus Convention Centre to hear about the latest science and technology in the oilfield, and catch up with old friends. We're sad to be missing out this year — we hope someone out there will be blogging!

GeoConvention highlights

There are more than fifty technical sessions at the conference this year. For what it's worth, these are the presentations we'd be sitting in the front row for if we were going:

• Dragana Todorovic-Marinic et al., Shedding more light on an oil sand reservoir by applying integrated spectral method analysis, Monday 1540, Macleod B
• Herrera and van der Baan, Automated seismic-to-well ties using dynamic time warping, Tuesday 1540, Glen 203
• Marco Perez et al., Rock physics and depositional trends, Wednesday 0840, Telus 104
• Steve Lynch, Oops: an introduction to seismic wavefield visualization, Wednesday 1340, Glen 203, followed by...
• Matteo Niccoli & Steve Lynch, A more perceptual colour palette for structure maps, Wednesday 1405, Glen 203
• Patrick Connolly, Inversion & integration — in a geological framework, Thursday 1040, Macleod A

Now run to the train and get to the ERCB Core Research Centre for...

• Randolf Koffman et al., A portable core image scanner, Thursday 1130

Guided fault interpretation

We've seen automated fault interpretation before, and now Transform have an offering too. A strongly tech-focused company, they have a decent shot at making it work in ordinary seismic data — the demo shows a textbook example:

GPU processing on the desktop

On Monday Paradigm announced their adoption of NVIDIA's Maximus technology into their desktop applications. Getting all gooey over graphics cards seems very 2002, but this time it's not about graphics — it's about speed. Reserving a Quadro processor for graphics, Paradigm is computing seismic attributes on a dedicated Tesla graphics processing unit, or GPU, rather than on the central processing unit (CPU). This is cool because GPUs are massively parallel and are much, much faster at certain kinds of computation because they don't have the process management, I/O, and other overheads that CPUs have. This is why seismic processing companies like CGGVeritas are adopting them for imaging. Cutting edge stuff!

In other news...

• The seismic processing landscape continues to shift as Schlumberger bought GEDCO last week. 
• TerraSpark's Insight Earth 1.7 will contain shale play tools, for fracture and permeability estimation for example.
• Geosoft have a new 'software service' product in their Montaj suite called VOXI.
• There was a nice story on the Scientific American blog recently about LWD from D/V Chikyu in the Pacific Ocean.
• BP have released an amazing-sounding 300GB deepwater Gulf of Mexico seismic dataset to academia, according to their in-house magazine (via OilIT). 

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services.