Editing Houston 2011 (section)

==Workshop report==
Matt Hall<br>
http://agilegeoscience.com/<br>
Canada<br><br>
The Petroleum Technology Transfer Council held a workshop in June on open software for reproducible computational geophysics was held at the Bureau of Economic Geology's Houston Research Center. Organized skillfully by Karl Schleicher and Robert Newsham of the University of Texas at Austin, it was two packed days of presentations, live demos, and spirited discussion. The agenda, and almost all of the presentations are available from the Madagascar wiki [http://reproducibility.org/wiki/Houston_2011]. For a quick rundown, read on.<br> <br>
Alex Mihai Popovici, CEO of Z-Terra, gave a great, very practical, overview of the relative merits of three major seismic processing packages: Seismic Unix, Madagascar, and SEPlib. He has a very real need: delivering leading edge seismic processing services to clients all over the world.<br><br>
Dave Hale, Colorado School of Mines professor, gave an overview of his Mines Java Toolkit, a library of tools for solving all sorts of computational problems, not just in geophysics. He also shared his interest in efficient parallelization, and in the programming languages Scala and Jython. <br><br>
Chuck Mosher of ConocoPhillips then gave the group a look at JavaSeis, an open source project that makes handling prestack seismic data easy and very, very fast. It has parallelization built into it, and is perfect for large, modern 3D datasets and multi-dimensional processing algorithms.<br><br>
Eric Jones is CEO of Enthought, the innovators behind (among other things) NumPy/SciPy and the Enthought Python Distribution. His take on the role of Python as an integrator and facilitator, handling data and improving usability for legacy software, was practical and refreshing.<br><br>
Richard Clarke of BP described the history and future of FreeUSP and FreeDDS, a powerful processing system. FreeDDS is being actively developed and released gradually by BP. It will eventually replace FreeUSP.<br> <br>
German Garabito of the Federal University of Parà, Brazil, generated a lot of interest in BotoSeis, the GUI he has developed to help him teach SeismicUnix. It allows one to build and manage processing flows visually, in a Java-built interface inspired by Focus, ProMax and other proprietary tools.<br><br>
Karl Schleicher, continuing the usability theme, followed up with a nice look at how he is building scripts to pull field data from the USGS online repository, and perform SU and Madagascar processing flows on them. He hopes he can build a library of such scripts as part of Sergey Fomel's reproducible geophysics efforts. <br><br>
Bill Menger of Global Geophysical was last up on the first day. He told the group a bit about GeoCraft ad CPSeis, projects he open sourced when he was at ConocoPhillips. His insight on what was required to get them into the open: cet permission, communicate the return on investment, know what you want to get out of it, pick a system to support, and be prepared for the commitment.<br><br>
Nick Vlad from FusionGeo was first on the second day. He gave us another look at open source systems from a commercial processing shop's perspective. Like Alex (and Renée, later), he gave plenty of evidence that open source is not only compatible with business, but it's good for business.<br><br>
Yang Zhang from Stanford then showed us how reproducibility is central to SEPlib (as it is to Madagascar). When possible, researchers in the Stanford Exploration Project build figures with makefiles, which can be run by anyone to easily reproduce the figure.<br><br>
Sergey Fomel of the University of Texas at Austin, while casually downloading and compiling Madagascar (that's how easy it is!), described how it too allows for quick regeneration of figures, even from other sources like Mathematica.<br><br>
Joe Dellinger from BP explained how he thought some basic interactivity could be added to Vplot, SEP's (and thus also Madagascar's) plotting utility. The goal would not be to build an all-singing, all-dancing graphics tool, but to incrementally improve Vplot.<br><br>
Bjorn Olofsson of SeaBird Exploration presented, for the first time ever, SeaSeis, a seismic QC and processing system that he has built with his own bare hands. He started the project in 2005 and open-sourced it about 18 months ago; it is used by SeaBird in production. Bjorn appealed for attention and help from interested developers; get in touch with him if you are interested. <br><br>
Renée Bourque of dGB also opened a lot of eyes with her overview of OpendTect and the Open Seismic Repository. dGB's tools are modern, user-friendly, and flexible. I think many people present realized that these tools could substantially augment many of the processing systems other were presenting, most of which lack graphical user interfaces and 3D rendering engines. <br><br>
Finally, I told the group a bit about my belief in the usefulness and importance of mobile devices in the lab and workplace. I went on to decribe the geoscience apps I am developing for Android, using a visual programming tool called App Inventor, itself a potentially powerful paradigm for building software and perhaps processing systems too. <br><br>
It was an inspiring and thought-provoking workshop. Thank you to Karl Schleicher and Robert Newsham for organizing, and Cheers! to the new friends and acquaintances. My own impression was that the greatest challenge ahead for this group is not so much computational, but more about integration and consolidation. I'm looking forward to the next one!