Reginald Beardsley formulates seven design principles for a modern seismic processing system:

A modern production seismic processing system must satisfy several conflicting goals:

• It must make efficient use of an ever changing, heterogeneous computing enviroment.
• It must be easy to locate the appropriate modules from a large number of choices.
• It must be easy to modify and test existing modules or write new ones without adversely impacting other users.
• It must be impossible to run the system with invalid or incomplete input and easy to identify the parameters required by a module, what allowable values are and the significance of the parameter.
• It must be possible to reproduce within roundoff error all operations on any data, at any time, even years later.
• Unwanted or unexpected interactions between system components must not take place.
• It must be possible to construct the system with limited resources.

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