An interactive system for seismic velocity analysis

Seismic data processing is a time-consuming operation. Two main reasons for this are the large amounts of data, which have to be put in and taken out of the computer regularly, and the need for intervention by an expert at many intermediate stages. A subsidiary cause is the large amount of computation. The recent appearance of multiprocessor computers has created the opportunity to provide an interactive system to ease and speed-up the seismic data processing cycle. This paper describes the development of an initial interactive system for the velocity analysis and NMO/stacking stage of seismic processing. Computational power and storage are supplied by two 32-node Intel iPSC/1 Hypercubes, both with 16 memory nodes and 16 vector nodes. Each hypercube has 96 Mbytes of memory and a top processing speed of over 100 Mflops (32 bit). A SUN-3 Workstation is used to display intermediate results and to enable the expert to direct the processing more efficiently.