The Balance Between Lowering Cost and Increasing Capability
Authors: Bartling Bill 
Published: February 2015

Moore’s law (an exponential growth in the number of transistors per integrated circuit) simultaneously delivers both reduced cost and improved capabilities, but most managers focus more aggressively on cost reduction than on capability improvement—and understandably so, as costs continue to drop dramatically for products used in established work processes. This approach leverages Moore’s law to do today—at a lower cost—what your business could do yesterday, and has been doing for 20 years.

But inevitably, technology innovators develop and deliver breakthroughs that can fundamentally change the economics of companies dependent upon information technology (IT) to drive their business and profitability. So at some point every industry needs to step back from the focus on reducing cost to ask the question: Can I do things differently in my business today that will substantially improve performance, and materially improve it much more aggressively, than I could ever achieve by saving another 10% on a cheaper personal computer? By grasping new technologies, often at the same or reduced cost compared to legacy systems, the industry can reap both financial savings and vastly increased computational capabilities. Energy companies that have decided to take advantage of both curves of Moore’s law are enjoying increased efficiency, production, and profits.

Improving Performance

In the mid-1980s, the geophysical work process changed from working with paper sections and maps to interpreting seismic data and automatically creating the resultant maps on computers. Although the movement to computers was a significant breakthrough because it allowed data to be viewed and understood much more quickly, the memory capacity of those early computers was so limited that the industry went from using multiple seismic attributes in the interpretation to only one: amplitude. The task of loading a second attribute to the process was difficult and time-consuming, and there was no effective way of simultaneously viewing multiple attributes. So additional attributes often were not incorporated. Fast forward 20 years, and there is an established standard work process in which seismic interpreters, having entered the workplace after the transition to computers, work predominantly with only a single attribute.

The computing capabilities of 2005, in contrast to 20 years ago, can take us back to where we were before the ubiquitous introduction of work stations, where multiple simultaneous attributes can be used in the standard work process but are now visualized and analyzed together in a common volumetric digital image. For example, last year, SGI and Landmark Graphics conducted a technology breakthrough using a data set loaned by Marathon Oil. Using Landmark’s Geoprobe interpretation software running on an SGI visualization system, the team successfully demonstrated how a 400 gigabyte volume could be visualized and analyzed in real time. This was a multiattribute volume that allowed the interpreter to look at the amplitude volume corendered with a continuity volume, pro-viding a high-resolution view of key faults and stratigraphic discontinuities in the volume.