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Zero distance and infinite resources

Hampson-Russell Software Services Ltd., Calgary, Canada

Corresponding author: brian@hampson-russell.com

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

The future of geoscience computing will depend on four critical areas: communications, computer hardware, graphics visualization hardware and software, and geoscience software development and utilization. The first two, and perhaps three, of these areas depend on technology developments outside the geosciences. And these areas are expanding with increasing speed. In fact, it is not hard to imagine a computing environment in the near future in which communications distance has shrunk to zero and computing resources have grown to infinity. Obviously, this is an exaggeration, because no matter how advanced our technology gets, there will always be users who want more bandwidth or disk space or a faster CPU. However, we are getting close to the point where a lack of technology is no longer the problem we face. Rather, and this brings up the fourth of the above points, we increasingly face a lack of skilled technology practitioners. In other words, who will be writing the software that takes full advantage of the new hardware, and who will be making full exploration use of the software?

This article will discuss ways in which we can ensure that we have enough skilled geoscientists to fill these needs, and how the software developer and geoscience software end user can work together to ensure an optimum solution to future E&P demands. But first, we will look at the drivers for increased computer resources: future seismic acquisition and processing trends.

	Future geoscience needs

 
As Chris Liner points out in his introduction to this special section, it is impossible to separate the history of geophysics from the history of computing. A few examples come immediately to mind. In the predigital, or analog, days, geoscientists were pushing the limit on the existing technology of the day, building "playback" centers where even processes such . . . [Full Text of this Article]