The most epic geophysics hackathon in the world, ever

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Words can't express how awesome the 2014 Geophysics Hackthon was. The spirit embodied by the participants is shared by our generous sponsors... the deliberate practice of creativity and collaboration. 

We convened at Thrive, a fantastic coworking space in the hip Lower Downtown district of Denver. Their friendly staff went well beyond their duty in accommodating our group. The abundance of eateries and bars makes it perfect for an event like this, especially when the organization is a bit, er, spontaneous.

We opened the doors at 8 on Saturday morning and put the coffee and breakfast out, without any firm idea of how many people would show up. But by 9 a sizeable cohort of undergrads and grad students from the Colorado School of Mines had already convened around projects, while others trickled in. The way these students showed up, took ownership, and rolled up their sleeves was inspiring. A few folks even spent last week learning Android in order to put their ideas on a mobile device. While at times we encounter examples that have caused us to wonder if we are going to be alright, these folks, with their audacity and wholesomeness, revive faith that we will. 

The theme of the event was resolution, but really the brief was wide open. There was a lot of non-seismic geophysics, a lot of interactive widgets ('slide this to change the thickness; slide that to change the resistivity'), and a lot of novel approaches. In a week or two we'll be posting a thorough review of the projects the 6 teams built, so stay tuned for that.

The photos are all on Flickr, or you can visit our Hashpi.pe for the captions and other tweetage.

Another great outcome was that all of the projects are open source. Several of the projects highlighted the escape-velocity innovation that is possible when you have an open platform behind you. The potential impact of tools like Mines JTK, SimPEG, and Madagascar is huge. Our community must not underestimate the super-powers these frameworks give us.

The hackathon will be back next year in New Orleans (17 and 18 October: mark your calendars!). We will find a way to add a hacker bootcamp for those wanting to get into this gig. And we're looking for ways to make something happen in Europe. If you have a bright idea about that, please get in touch. 

A really good conversation

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Today was Day 2 of the Canada GeoConvention. But... all we had the energy for was the famous Unsolved Problems Unsession. So no real highlights today, just a report from the floor of Room 101.

Today was the day. We slept about as well as two 8-year-olds on Christmas Eve, having been up half the night obsessively micro-hacking our meeting design (right). The nervous anticipation was richly rewarded. About 50 of the most creative, inquisitive, daring geoscientists at the GeoConvention came to the Unsession — mostly on purpose. Together, the group surfaced over 100 pressing questions facing the upstream industry, then filtered this list to 4 wide-reaching problems of integration:

  • making the industry more open
  • coping with error and uncertainty
  • improving seismic resolution
  • improving the way our industry is perceived

We owe a massive debt of thanks to our heroic hosts: Greg Bennett, Tannis McCartney, Chris Chalcraft, Adrian Smith, Charlene Radons, Cale White, Jenson Tan, and Tooney Fink. Every one of them far exceeded their brief and brought 100× more clarity and continuity to the conversations than we could have had without them. Seriously awesome people.  

This process of waking our industry up to new ways of collaborating is just beginning. We will, you can be certain, write more about the unsession after we've had a little time to parse and digest what happened.

If you're at the conference, tell us what we missed today!

A revolution in seismic acquisition?

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We're in warm, sunny Calgary for the GeoConvention 2013. The conference feels like it's really embracing geophysics this year — in the past it's always felt more geological somehow. Even the exhibition floor felt dominated by geophysics. Someone we spoke to speculated that companies were holding their geological cards close to their chests, but the service companies are still happy to talk about (ahem, promote) their geophysical advances.

Are you at the conference? What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

We caught about 15 talks of the 100 or so on offer today. A few of them ignited the old whines about half-cocked proofs of efficacy. Why is it still acceptable to say that a particular seismic volume or inversion result is 'higher resolution' or 'more geological' with nothing more than a couple of sections or timeslices as evidence?

People are excited about designing seismic acquisition expressly for wavefield reconstruction. In a whole session devoted to the subject, for example, Mauricio Sacchi showed how randomization helps with regularization in processing, allowing us to either get better image quality, or to lower cost. It feels like the start of a new wave of innovation in acquisition, which has more than its fair share of recent innovation: multi-component, wide azimuth, dual-sensor, simultaneous source...

Is it a revolution? Or just the fallacy of new things looking revolutionary... until the next new thing? It's intriguing to the non-specialist. People are talking about 'beyond Nyquist' again, but this time without inducing howls of derision. We just spent an hour talking about it, and we think there's something deep going on... we're just not sure how to articulate it yet.

Unsolved problems

We were at the conference today, but really we are focused on the session we're hosting tomorrow morning. Along with a roomful of adventurous conference-goers (you're invited too!), looking for the most pressing questions in subsurface science. We start at 8 a.m. in Telus 101/102 on the main floor of the north building.

News headlines

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Our old friend the News post... We fell off the wagon there for a bit. From now on we'll just post news when we collect a few stories, or as it happens. If you miss the old last-Friday-of-the-month missive, we are open to being convinced!

First release of Canopy

Back in November we mentioned Canopy, Austin-based Enthought's new Python programming environment, especially aimed at scientists. Think of it as Python (an easy-to-use language) in MATLAB form (with file management, plotting, etc.). Soon, Enthought plan to add a geophysical toolbox — SEGY read/write, trace display, and so on. We're very, very excited for the future of rapid geophysical problem-solving! More on the Enthought blog.

The $99 supercomputer

I recently got a Raspberry Pi — a $35 Linux machine a shade larger than a credit card. We're planning to use it at The HUB South Shore to help kids learn to code. These little machines are part of what we think could be an R&D revolution, as it gets cheaper and cheaper to experiment. Check out the University of Southampton's Raspberry Pi cluster!

If that's not awesome enough for you, how about Parallella, which ships this summer and packs 64 cores for under $100! If you're a software developer, you need to think about whether your tools are ready for parallel processing — not just on the desktop, but everywhere. What becomes possible?

Geophysics + 3D printing = awesome

Unless you have been living on a seismic boat for the last 3 years, you can't have failed to notice 3D printing. I get very excited when I think about the possibilities — making real 3D geomodels, printing replacement parts in the field, manifesting wavefields, geobodies, and so on. The best actual application we've heard of so far — these awesome little physical models in the Allied Geophysical Laboratories at the University of Houston (scroll down a bit).

Sugru

Nothing to do with geophysics, but continuing the hacker tech and maker theme... check out sugru.com — amazing stuff. Simple, cheap, practical. I am envisaging a maker lab for geophysics — who wants in?

Is Oasis the new Ocean?

Advanced Seismic is a Houston-based geophysical software startup that graduated from the Surge incubator in 2012. So far, they have attracted a large amount of venture capital, and I understand they're after tens of millions more. They make exciting noises about Oasis, a new class of web-aware, social-savvy software with freemium pricing. But so far there's not a lot to see — almost everything on their site says 'coming soon' and Evan and I have had no luck running the (Windows-only) demo tool. Watch this space.

Slow pitch

The world's longest-running lab experiment is a dripping flask of pitch, originally set up in 1927. The hydrocarbon has a viscosity of about 8 billion centipoise, which is 1000 times more viscous than Alberta bitumen. So far 8 drops have fallen, the last on 28 November 2000. The next? Looks like any day now! Or next year. 

Image: University of Queensland, licensed CC-BY-SA. 

News of the month

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The last news of the year. Here's what caught our eye in December.

Online learning, at a price

There was an online university revolution in 2012 — look for Udacity (our favourite), Coursera, edX, and others. Paradigm, often early to market with good new ideas, launched the Paradigm Online University this month. It's a great idea — but the access arrangement is the usual boring oil-patch story: only customers have access, and they must pay $150/hour — more than most classroom- and field-based courses! Imagine the value-add if it was open to all, or free to customers.

Android apps on your PC

BlueStacks is a remarkable new app for Windows and Mac that allows you to run Google's Android operating system on the desktop. This is potentially awesome news — there are over 500,000 apps on this platform. But it's only potentially awesome because it's still a bit... quirky. I tried running our Volume* and AVO* apps on my Mac and they do work, but they look rubbish. Doubtless the technology will evolve rapidly — watch this space. 

2PFLOPS HPC 4 BP

In March, we mentioned Total's new supercomputer, delivering 2.3 petaflops (quadrillion floating point operations per second). Now BP is building something comparable in Houston, aiming for 2 petaflops and 536 terabytes of RAM. To build it, the company has allocated 0.1 gigadollars to high-performance computing over the next 5 years.

Haralick textures for everyone

Matt wrote about OpendTect's new texture attributes just before Christmas, but the news is so exciting that we wanted to mention it again. It's exciting because Haralick textures are among the most interesting and powerful of multi-trace attributes — right up there with coherency and curvature. Their appearance in the free and open-source core of OpendTect is great news for interpreters.

That's it for 2012... see you in 2013! Happy New Year.

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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News from the interface between the infinite istropic half-spaces of geoscience and technology. Got tips? 

Matt was at the SEG Annual Meeting in Las Vegas at the beginning of the month. If you didn't make the trip, and even if you did, Don't miss his highlights posts.

Webapp for wells

This is exciting. Subsurfr could be the start of a much-needed and long-overdue wave of rapid web innovation for petrotechnical tools. Much kudos to tiny Wellstorm Development for the bold initiative; it makes you wonder what on earth Halliburton and Schlumberger are up to. Right from your browser, you can fly around the subsurface of North Dakota, see logs, add picks, build surface segments, and provide the creators with feedback. Try it out!

OpendTect gets even awesomer 

OpendTect goes from strength to strength, having passed 100 000 downloads on about 11 November. If you haven't tried it yet, you really should. It's like all those other integrated volume interpretation tools, with the small difference that it's open source-you can read the code. Oh, and it's free. There is that.

Paul de Groot, one of the founders of dGB, told me at SEG that he's been tinkering with code again. He's implemented GLCM-based texture attributes, and it will be in the open source base package soon. Nice.

The next big thing

Landmark's PowerCalculator was good. Geocraft was awesome. Now there's Canopy - Enthought's attempt to bring Python coding to the rest of us. The idea is to provide a MATLAB-like environment for the galaxy of mathematical and scientific computing packs for Python (numpy, scipy, matplotlib, to name a few). It's in beta right now — why not ask for an invite? Even more exiciting for geophysicists — Enthought is developing a set of geoscience plugins, allowing you to load SEGY data, display seismic, and perform other nifty tricks. Can't wait.

More Nova Scotia exploration

BP won licenses in the latest offshore exploration round (NS12–1), in exchange for a $1.05 billion work bid on 4 deep water parcels. This is in line with Shell's winning bid last January of $970 million, and they also added to their acreage — it seems there's an exploration renaissance happening in Nova Scotia. After the award, there were lots of questions about BP's safety record, but the licensing rules only allow for the highest bidder to win — there's no scrutiny of suitability at this stage. Awarding the license and later denying the right to drill seems a bit disingenuous, however. Water depth: up to about 3500 m!

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 and Canopy, because they are awesome and we use them almost every day.

News of the month

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Another month flies by, and it's time for our regular news round-up! News tips, anyone?

Knowledge sharing

At the start of the month, SPE launched PetroWiki. The wiki has been seeded with one part of the 7-volume Petroleum Engineering Handbook, a tome that normally costs over $600. They started with Volume 2, Drilling Engineering, which includes lots of hot topics, like fracking (right). Agile was involved in the early design of the wiki, which is being built by Knowledge Reservoir. 

Agile stuff

Our cheatsheets are consistenly some of the most popular things on our site. We love them too, so we've been doing a little gardening — there are new, updated editions of the rock physics and geophysics cheatsheets.

Thank you so much to the readers who've let us know about typos! 

Wavelets

Nothing else really hit the headlines this month — perhaps people are waiting for SEG. Here are some nibbles...

  • We just upgraded a machine from Windows to Linux, sadly losing Spotfire in the process. So we're on the lookout for another awesome analytics tool. VISAGE isn't quite what we need, but you might like these nice graphs for oil and gas.
  • Last month we missed the newly awarded exploration licenses in the inhospitable Beaufort Sea [link opens a PDF]. Franklin Petroleum of the UK might have been surprised by the fact that they don't seem to have been bidding against anyone, as they picked up all six blocks for little more than the minimum bid.
  • It's the SEG Annual Meeting next week... and Matt will be there. Look out for daily updates from the technical sessions and the exhibition floor. There's at least one cool new thing this year: an app!

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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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. 

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.