Big data in geoscience

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Big data is what we got when the decision cost of deleting data became greater than the cost of storing it.
George Dyson, at Strata London

I was looking for something to do in London this week. Tempted by the Deep-water contintental margins meeting in Piccadilly, I instead took the opportunity to attend a different kind of conference. The media group O'Reilly, led by the inspired Tim O'Reilly, organizes conferences. They're known for being energetic, quirky, and small-company-friendly. I wanted to see one, so I came to Strata.

Strata is the conference for big data, one of the woolliest buzzwords in computer science today. Some people are skeptical that it's anything other than a new way to provoke fear and uncertainty in IT executives, the only known way to make them spend money. Indeed, Google "big data" and the top 5 hits are: Wikipedia (obvsly), IBM, McKinsey, Oracle, and EMC. It might be hype, but all this attention might lead somewhere good. 

We're all big data scientists

Geoscientists, especially geophysicists, are unphased by the concept of big data. The acquisition data from a 3D survey can easily require 10TB (10,240GB) or even 100TB of storage. The data must be written, read, processed, and re-written dozens of times during processing, then delivered, loaded, and interpreted. In geoscience, big data is normal data. 

So it's great that big data problems are being hacked on by thousands of developers, researchers, and companies that, until about a year ago, were only interested in games and the web. About 99% of them are not working on problems in geophysics or petroleum, but there will be insight and technology that will benefit our industry.

It's not just about data management. Some of the most creative data scientists in the world are at this conference. People are showing dense, and sometimes beautiful, visualizations of giant datasets, like the transport displays by James Cheshire's research group at UCL (right). I can't wait to show some of these people a SEG-Y or LAS file and, unencumbered by our curmudgeonly tradition of analog display metaphors, see how they would display it.

Would the wiggle display pass muster?

News of the month

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Our more-or-less regular news round-up is here again. News tips?

Geophysics giant

On Monday the French geophysics company CGGVeritas announced a deal to buy most of Fugro's Geoscience division for €1.2 billion (a little over $1.5 billion). What's more, the two companies will enter into a joint venture in seabed acquisition. Fugro, based in the Netherlands, will pay CGGVeritas €225 million for the privilege. CGGVeritas also pick up commercial rights to Fugro's data library, which they will retain. Over 2500 people are involved in the deal — and CGGVeritas are now officially Really Big. 

Big open data?

As Evan mentioned in his reports from the SEG IQ Earth Forum, Statoil is releasing some of their Gullfaks dataset through the SEG. This dataset is already 'out there' as the Petrel demo data, though there has not yet been an announcement of exactly what's in the package. We hope it includes gathers, production data, core photos, and so on. The industry needs more open data! What legacy dataset could your company release to kickstart innovation?

Journal innovation

Again, as Evan reported recently, SEG is launching a new peer-reviewed, quarterly journal — Interpretation. The first articles will appear in early 2013. The journal will be open access... but only till the end of 2013. Perhaps they will reconsider if they get hundreds of emails asking for it to remain open access! Imagine the impact on the reach and relevance of the SEG that would have. Why not email the editorial team?

In another dabble with openness, The Leading Edge has opened up its latest issue on reserves estimation, so you don't need to be an SEG member to read it. Why not forward it to your local geologist and reservoir engineer?

Updating a standard

It's all about SEG this month! The SEG is appealing for help revising the SEG-Y standard, for its revision 2. If you've ever whined about the lack of standardness in the existing standard, now's your chance to help fix it. If you haven't whined about SEG-Y, then I envy you, because you've obviously never had to load seismic data. This is a welcome step, though I wonder if the real problems are not in the standard itself, but in education and adoption.

The SEG-Y meeting is at the Annual Meeting, which is coming up in November. The technical program is now online, a fact which made me wonder why on earth I paid $15 for a flash drive with the abstracts on it.

Log analysis in OpendTect

We've written before about CLAS, a new OpendTect plug-in for well logs and petrophysics. It's now called CLAS Lite, and is advertised as being 'by Sitfal', though it was previously 'by Geoinfo'. We haven't tried it yet, but the screenshots look very promising.

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. Except OpendTect, which we definitely do endorse.

News of the month

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Like the full moon, our semi-regular news round-up has its second outing this month. News tips?

New software releases

QGIS, our favourite open source desktop GIS too, moves to v1.8 Lisboa. It gains pattern fills, terrain analysis, layer grouping, and lots of other things.

Midland Valley, according to their June newsletter, will put Move 2013 on the Mac, and they're working on iOS and Android versions too. Multi-platform keeps you agile. 

New online tools

The British Geological Survey launched their new borehole viewer for accessing data from the UK's hundreds of shallow holes. Available on mobile platforms too, this is how you do open data, staying relevant and useful to people.

Joanneum Research, whose talk at EAGE I mentioned, is launching their seismic attributes database seismic-attribute.info as a €6000/year consortium, according to an email we got this morning. Agile* won't be joining, we're too in love with Mendeley's platform, but maybe you'd like to — enquire by email.

Moar geoscience jobs

Neftex, a big geoscience consulting and research shop based in Oxford, UK, is growing. Already with over 80 people, they expect to hire another 50 or so. That's a lot of geologists and geophysicists! And Oxford is a lovely part of the world.

Ikon Science, another UK subsurface consulting and research firm, is opening a Calgary office. We're encouraged to see that they chose to announce this news on Twitter — progressive!

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. Except QGIS, which we definitely do endorse, cuz it's awesome. 

Shales and technology

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Day three of the SEG IQ Earth Forum had more organizational diversity than the previous two days. The morning session was on seismic for unconventional plays. This afternoon was for showcasing novel implementations of seismic attributes.

Resource shale plays aren’t as wildly economic as people think. This is not only because geology is complex and heterogeneous, but also because drilling and completions processes aren't constant either. Robin Pearson from Anadarko presented a wonderful shale gas science experiment: three systematic field tests designed to target key uncertainties:

  • List all of your uncertainties and come up with a single test for evaluating each, holding all other variables constant.
  • Make sure you collect enough data so that results are statistically valid.
  • Make your experiment scalable — 10 measurements must be extrapolatable to influence hundreds.

To better understand production heterogeniety, they drilled and fracked three wells in exactly the same way. Logging and microseismic surface monitoring showed a tight limestone zone that was liberating gas from a strike slip fault, previously unseen. 

The best talk for interpreters so far was from Randy Pepper, who has done basin-scale modeling to define the erosional and non-depositional periods of geologic history not captured in the rock record. He used Wheeler diagrams to transform between two different representations of the same data, so that interpreters could work interactively between the structural and stratigraphic domains. It reminded me of dGB's Horizon Cube technology, allowing interpreters to explore between the mappable horizons in their data. Next step: allowing interpreters to perturb structural restorations on the fly. 

If you showed a seismic amplitude map to a radiologist, they might form completely rational arguments for arteries and other anatomical structures. Interpreters sometimes see what they want to see, which can be a problem. My favorite talk so far was from Jonathan Henderson from ffa. He is dedicated to keeping art and expertise in the interpretation process. His company has developed software for building data-guided geobodies with an organic and intuitive design. Automatic data classification can only go so far in elucidating what the human brain can perceive. Read his article.

I repeat his principles here:

  • Understanding the imaged geology: the art of interpretation,
  • Measurements and Uncertainty: a need for science
  • Adaptive Geobodies: combining art and science.

Kudos to John for ending the talk with a video demo of the software in action. Gasps from the crowd were a plenty. I'm hoping for more of this tomorrow!

News of the month

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Our semi-regular news round-up from the greenbelt between geoscience and technology.

OpendTect 4.4

Our favourite volume interpretation tool, OpendTect, moved to version 4.4 in June. It seems to have skipped 4.3 completely, which never made it into a stable release. With the new version come 3 new plug-ins: Seismic Net Pay, Seismic Feature Enhancement, and Computer Log Analysis Software (right)—we're looking forward to playing with that.

The cutting edge of interpretation

A new SEG event aimed especially at quantitative interpreters is coming later this month — the SEG IQ Earth Forum. Have a look at the technical program. Evan will be there, and is looking forward to some great discussion, and finding out more about Statoil's open Gullfaks dataset. On the last day, he will be talking about Agile's workflow for interpreting seismic in geothermal fields... stay tuned.

Geoscience freeware

We read in OilIT that US consultancy Ryder Scott has updated its Reservoir Solutions tools for Excel. These include Volumetrics, QuickLook Economics, Gas Material Balance, and LogWizard. If you try them out, do let us know what you think of them!

New iPad apps

Geoscience is perhaps a little slow picking up on the tablet revolution, but mobile apps are trickling out. We love seeing experiments like Pocket Seis, by Houston-based geoscientist-developer Jacob Foshee. And it's interesting to see what the more established software-makers do on these platforms... we think Landmark's OpenWells Mobile app looks rather tame.

This regular(ish) news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. Except OpendTect, which we do endorse, cuz it's awesome. The screenshot from CLAS is a low-res fair-use image for illustration only, and copyright of dGB Earth Sciences. 

Wiki maniacs unite

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Last year, we decided to go to at least one non-geoscience conference every year. The idea is to meet other communities, learn about other fields, have some new ideas, and find more ways to be useful. So far, Evan and I have been to symposiums on mathematics, geothermal energy, being more awesome, and science online. Continuing in this vein, I just got home from Wikimania 2012 — the international conference about all things wiki.

Strictly speaking, Wikimania is about the Wikimedia movement, the global effort to "give to every single person on the planet free access to the sum of all human knowledge". This quest is supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization of professional enthusiasts. Their most conspicuous project is Wikipedia, but it's far from being the only one. Have you heard of Wikimedia Commons? Wikisource? Wikibooks? Read all about them.

The conference was unlike anything I've ever been to. Despite attracting over 950 delegates, it felt more like a meeting of colleagues and friends than a conference of professionals and strangers. I've never felt such a strong undertow of common purpose, and quiet, deliberate action. The phrase intentional community was made for this group.

In short, Wikipedia looks even more awesome from the inside than it does from the outside.

If you too are a Wikipedia enthusiast, here are some things I learned:

  • The number of active editors has fallen by 4000 since 2011, to 85k
  • During the conference, the number of articles in English Wikipedia passed 4 million
  • Developers are working hard to make Wikipedia easier to edit, and big changes are coming
  • Wikipedia Zero is an important effort to make the site available to everyone
  • Developers are working on making Wikipedia available via SMS and other channels
  • Wikis—both private and public—are everywhere: schools, museums, libraries, galleries, academia, government, societies, and corporations

Next time, I'll list a few ways you can get more involved.

The photo is from Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC-BY-SA by User:Awersowy. 

News of the month

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A quick round-up of recent news. If you think we missed something, drop us a line!

EAGE gets more global

The annual EAGE conference and buzzword-fest in Copenhagen was the largest ever, with over 6200 delegates. The organization is getting ever more global, having just signed memorandums of understanding with both AAPG and SEG — getting this done was a big cap-feather for John Underhill, who stepped down as president at the end of the week.

The most popular session of the conference was Creativity & Boldness in Exploration, organized by Jean-Jacques Jarrige of Total. At least 800 people crammed into the auditorium, causing exhibition-floor vendors to complain that 'everything has gone quiet'.

Microsoft gets more social... maybe

Most of our knowledge sharing clients have dabbled with social media. Chat is more or less ubiquitous, wikis are extremely popular, and microblogging is taking off. Yammer is one of the disrupters here, and it seemed almost inevitable that they would be acquired. How dull to hear that Microsoft seems to be the main suitor. They need something to work in this space, but have struggled so far. 

Find your digital objects!

Science is benefitting every day from social media, as conversations happen on Twitter and elsewhere. Sharing data, methods, photos, and figures is fun and helps grow stronger communities. Figshare is a still-new place to share graphics and data, and its acquisition by Macmillan's Digital Science business gave it more clout earlier this year. It now offers a Digital Object Identifier, also known as a DOI, for every item you upload. This is as close to a guarantee of persistence as you can get on the web, and it's a step closer to making everything citable in tomorrow's scientific literature.

Forecast is for cloud

One of the buzzwords at EAGE was 'the cloud' as companies fall over each other trying to get in on the action. Halliburton has had a story for years, but we think the giants will struggle in this space—the ones to watch are the startups. FUSE are one of the more convincing outfits, dragging E&P data management into the 21st century.

In other news

Touch is coming to E&P. Those lovely interfaces on your phone and tablet are, slowly but surely, getting traction in subsurface geoscience as Schlumberger teams up with Perceptive Pixel to bring a 27" multi-touch interface to Petrel. 

Thank goodness you're a geoscientist! Geophysics is one of the most employable degrees, according to a report last year by Georgetown University that's been covered lots since. Our impression: the more quantitative you are, the more employable.

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. 

News of the month

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Welcome to our more-or-less regular new post. Seen something awesome? Get in touch!

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:

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

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...

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. 

One week countdown

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We're super-excited, dear reader. Even more than usual.

At the Calgary GeoConvention last year, we hatched a plan. The idea was simple: ask as many amazing geophysicists as we could to help us create something unique and fun. Now, as the conference creeps up on us again, it's almost ready. A new product from Agile that we think will make you smile.

Normally we like to talk about what we're up to, but this project has been a little different. We weren't at all sure it was going to work out until about Christmas time. And it had a lot of moving parts, so the timeline has been, er, flexible. But the project fits nicely into our unbusiness model: it has no apparent purpose other than being interesting and fun. Perfect!

In an attempt to make it look like we have a marketing department, or perhaps to confirm that we definitely do not, let's count down to next Tuesday morning, in milliseconds of course. Come back then — we hope to knock your socks at least partly off...

News of the month

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A few bits of news about geology, geophysics, and technology in the hydrocarbon and energy realm. Do drop us a line if you hear of something you think we ought to cover.

All your sequence strat

The SEPM, which today calls itself the Society for Sedimentary Geology (not the Society of Economic Palaeontologists and Mineralogists, which is where the name comes from, IIRC), has upgraded its website. It looks pretty great (nudge nudge, AAPG!). The awesome SEPM Strata, a resource for teaching and learning sequence stratigraphy, also got a facelift. 

Hat-tip to Brian Romans for this one.

Giant sand volcano

Helge Løseth of Statoil, whom we wrote about last week in connection with the Source Rocks from Seismic workflow, was recently in the news again. This time he and his exploration team were describing the Pleistocene extrusion of more than 10 km3 of sand onto the sea-floor in the northern North Sea, enough to bury Manhattan in 160 m of sand.

The results are reported in Løseth, H, N Rodrigues, and P Cobbold (2012) and build on earlier work by the same team (Rodrigues et al. 2009). 

Tape? There's still tape??

Yes, there's still tape. This story just caught my eye because I had no idea people were still using tape. It turns out that the next generation of tape, Ultrium LTO-6, will be along in the second half of 2012. The specs are pretty amazing: 8 TB (!) of compressed data, and about 200 MB/s (that's megabytes) transfer rates. The current generation of cartridges, LTO-5, cost about $60 and hold 3 TB — a similar-performing hard drive will set you back more than double that. 

The coolest cluster

Physics enables geophysics in lots of cool ways. CGGVeritas is using a 600 kW Green Revolution Cooling CarnotJet liquid cooling system to refrigerate 24 cluster racks in GRC's largest installation to date. In the video below, you can see an older 100 kW system. The company claims that these systems, in which the 40°C racks sit bathed in non-conductive oil, reduce the cost of cooling a supercomputer by about 90%... pretty amazing.

Awesomer still, this server is using Supermicro's SuperServer GPU-accelerated servers. GPUs, or graphics processing units, have massively parallel architectures (over 1000 cores per server), and can perform some operations much faster than ordinary CPUs, which are engineered to perform 'executive' functions as well as just math.

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. The cartridge image is licensed CC-BY-SA by Wikimedia Commons user andy_hazelbury. The CarnotJet image is from grcooling.com and thought to be fair use.