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FreeUSP Download
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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Research
This is a brief history of how scientists at the research facility of a major oil company conceived and developed a seismic processing system on unix to serve their research needs in the areas of signal analysis and wavefield imaging, how they persevered in the face of organizational politics, and how they ultimately triumphed to the benefit of both research and seismic exploration. As you download and unpack FreeUSP please take a minute to read our history... It sketches a journey important to us and it recognizes a number of valued colleagues along the way. In its modest way it tries to imbue FreeUSP with a little of the human element.
Like most major oil companies Amoco had its own internal proprietary processing system. Amoco's Seismic Information System (SIS) developed over a period of many years starting in the mid-1960's when digital seismic data started to be routinely recorded in the field and when large mainframe computers became available to process those data. The genesis for the digital seismic processing revolution however pre-dates this period by more than a decade. It actually began with Norbert Wiener and a visionary energetic group of students at MITs Geophysical Analysis Group (GAG). If Professor Wiener provided the seeds for revolution Sven Treitel and Enders Robinson provided abundant fertile soil for them to grow. These two pioneers led the way laying the framework for digital data processing, including band pass filtering and the concept of the layer cake earth model and prediction error filtering. This digital tool kit provided the foundation of every subsequent proprietary processing system.
During this time fundamental research into digital signal analysis and wavefield imaging continued. The Robinsons and Treitels in turn produced a new crop of students eager to turn their ideas into practical results. At Amoco's Tulsa research facility a number of these scientists gradually grew frustrated with the disconnection between research and production data processing: trying new algorithms on amounts of seismic data large enough to be considered part of the exploration process. By the mid 1980's this desire to wed signal analysis research and seismic interpretation became paramount. At that time happy circumstance provided one of Amoco's first unix boxes, an HP9000 with 3mb of memory, three cpu's, and 400mb of disk. The machine was part of a purchase to provide the core of a system to process digital acoustic log data in real time in the field. It quickly became apparent that the unix operating system was an ideal framework upon which to build a more general data processing system, one that was disk oriented relying on the unix structures of stdin, stdout, and stderr to handle data flow from one independent process to another. This contrasted with several vendor systems of the time which were essentially giant fortran wrapper programs which built a data processing flow by linking desired object code into a single runtime program. The premise was that only the fortran (and later the C) compiler could be relied upon to be portable across hardware. Such systems tend to be very finely tuned making contributions by a loosely knit coterie of scientists with disparate coding skills problematic. As the unix tide of popularity surged across a sea of hardware vendors USP was born in the summer of 1985.
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