Between December 1996 and June 2000 I was working as a Project Engineer for Schlumberger Geco-Prakla in Oslo, developing systems for seismic acquisition and online processing.

In 2000, Geco-Prakla was a company with approx 5000 employees, where around 300 worked in the R&D department in Oslo. Schlumberger had around 65000 employees worldwide. Geco-Prakla and Western Geophysical has now merged into a company called WesternGeco, which was later merged into Schlumberger again.

I was mainly involved in developing the following systems:

  • TRIACQ 1.6 - marine seismic acquisition system. TRIACQ controls a network of thousands of hydrophones deployed in sea from which it receives data at a rate of up to 5 MB/s sustained. The system acquires and reformats the data before writing it to tape. (~10 people involved)
  • TRILOGY QC 1.6 - online seismic processing system using the Gecoseis processing system. Typical usage: noise analysis (FFT, FK), attribute analysis (RMS, timing errors) and simple online data processing (CDP, Brute Stacks, Swell Attenuation). (~10 people involved)
  • TQC 2.0 - a new system for online quality control of seismic data (replacing TRILOGY QC 1.6). Inside TQC 2.0 is a fullblown Seismos/GeoFrame seismic processing package which we especially adapted and integrated in our system to cope with on-the-fly data processing. (~10 people involved)
  • Q Marine - a new single sensor seismic acquisition system designed to acquire and process data at a rate of 20-50 MB/s sustained. (~30 people involved)

TRIACQ and TRILOGY QC had been in the field for many years when I started in 1996. We were constantly developing new versions of the systems, both improving the software and hardware. The systems consisted of several million lines of codes written in C++, C, Fortran and Java running on a farm of Sun servers. In 1997 we started to use Corba to communicate between the various sub-systems and applications. An OmniWorks/SMS repository was used to do multi-site software configuration management.

I had the following roles:

  • Software/System developer in the TRIACQ and TRILOGY QC projects
  • C++, C and Corba programmer
  • System Architect in the Central Acquisition Systems group
  • Knowledge Manager of Software/System Architecture (Schlumberger world-wide)
  • System Administrator of several Sun servers in our development lab
  • Local High Performance Computing “expert”
  • Purchasing Sun hardware (approx 1M USD in 1999)
  • Evaluation of new disk, tape, graphics and network technologies
  • Integration of Seismos/GeoFrame/Oracle into the TRILOGY system
  • Software configuration manager for TQC20 and TQC16
  • OmniWorks/SMS administrator (Software Management System)
  • GNU guru, Perl hacker and Emacs evangelist

Here is a brief summary of some events, trips, courses, seminars, conferences, and other stuff that I was invovled in while at Schlumberger:

  • TQC20 Field Installation (3 days) Den Haag 2000
  • TQC20 Field Test on Geco Tau (1 month) offshore Brazil 1999
  • Knowledge Management Seminar (1 week) Houston 1999
  • UML course (2 days) Oslo 1999
  • GeoFrame/Seismos integration (1 week) London 1999
  • SuperComputing’98 conference (1 week) Orlando 1998
  • Iterative Development (2 days) Oslo 1998
  • OmniWorks administrator course (2 days) London 1997
  • Advanced Corba/Orbix (3 days) Oslo 1997
  • Introduction to Corba (2 days) Oslo 1997
  • Field visit (1 week) offshore Norway 1997
  • Seismos Programmers Training (1 week) London 1997
  • Marine Survival Course (1 week) Aberdeen 1997
  • Introduction to Seismic and Geophysics (1 week) Oslo 1997