It accommodates a wide variety of physical descriptions of the seismic wave propagation process and yields estimates of physical parameters such as compressional and shear velocities, density, and source radiation pattern that are indicative of rock properties and in some cases fluid content. A number of other research groups around the world have developed approaches similar to DSO, some independently, some inspired directly by the work at Rice University. The technological potential of DSO is also being evaluated through The Rice Inversion Project, an industrial research consortium with eight corporate sponsors in 1994 that also supports the work of this group. This implementation must accommodate a wide variety of data set sizes and formats and physical modeling assumptions. This design has been very successful in allowing project members to test quickly the effects of changed physical assumptions and data properties and may have some utility for researchers in other fields.
Parallelism is implicit at many levels in seismic inversion software.
It is a commonplace of scientific computation that realizing the benefits of parallelism requires considerable effort. The design uses explicit message passing implemented through Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Parallel Virtual Machine package. The parallel inversion software runs especially well in distributed computing environments, i.e., workstation clusters, and could be useful even in smaller firms and laboratories that do not have access to large multiprocessor machines. Future production is dependent upon the use of computational science to aid in the extraction of oil and gas from the existing oil reserves in the United States. Parallel computers permit researchers to create detailed oil reservoir models that help them better predict the effects of well placement and enhanced oil recovery strategies.