Questions and Answers

Unfortunately, we don’t have a silent installer available from our website. But here is another way to install PaleoScan silently on your machines, from the command prompt:

Use the following syntax: paleoscan.exe /S /D=C:\destination_folder

You may want to use the same arguments for the uninstall executable: uninstall.exe /S

Let us know if this helps.

Which version of Petrel do you use? Because if you use our latest version of PaleoScan (2022.1.1), you can use either the "PaleoScan 2022-Petrel 2022" or "PaleoScan 2022-Petrel 2021" connector only. This means that Petrel 2022 or 2021 is installed on your computer.

You can find the different versions of the PaleoScan connectors just here https://www.eliis-geo.com/connect-a.html

Little trick to keep track with the naming of the versions: the compatibility works for the versions of Petrel and PaleoScan with maximum one year difference. If there is more than two years difference, you should always take Petrel's version as reference.

For example:

•  if you work with PaleoScan 2021 and Petrel 2019, the Data Connector you should use is "Petrel 2019 ← → PaleoScan 2020"

•  if you work with PaleoScan 2019 and Petrel 2021, the Data Connector you should use is "Petrel 2021 ← → PaleoScan 2021"

If you need more information on how to use the Petrel Data Connector, do not hesitate to check its dedicated Userguide.

Please let us know if this helps.

PaleoScan runs on PCs, laptop, desktop or workstation. PaleoScan does not run on Mac computers. PaleoScan can also run on Virtual Machines.

PaleoScan requires Windows 64-bit version 7 or above.

The minimum /recommended hardware configuration to run PaleoScan is:

The recommendation for the percentage of physical memory allocated to PaleoScan is to keep the 30% default value for a machine with at least 16GB of RAM.

The “Temporary Directory” stores intermediate volumes computed by PaleoScan. The “Temporary Directory” does not need to be at the same location than the PaleoScan project and can be set by the user. It must however have at least 3 times the size of the seismic volume of free space.

The recommendation for GPU usage is to select the graphic card and for the CPU usage is to keep the default number of threads. Note that enabling the GPU parallelization will not dramatically increase Paleoscan’s performance except for the Properties Modeling module.

CPU parallelization is widely used in PaleoScan but GPU acceleration (using OpenCL technology) is currently used only in the Properties Modeling module and for some attributes computation, such as similarity. When both are enabled, GPU is used instead of CPU for the processes that support GPU. The other processes that do not support GPU but CPU parallelization run faster when CPU multithreading (several threads running on the same CPU) is enabled. However, all the threads are processed on the machine running PaleoScan and share the machine’s memory. Threads cannot be processed separately on different CPUs and memories. Paleoscan’s tasks (Geo-Model, attributes computation...) can only be started from the PaleoScan GUI (Graphical User Interface) as single executables. Distributed environments, with several physical machines with separated memory and CPU, are therefore not supported. 

Our internal benchmarks show that PaleoScan’s performance does not increase linearly with the number of cores used: 8 cores will definitely improve the performance but it will peak at 16 cores and even decrease beyond 16.

PaleoScan accesses hard drives intensely for reading from and writing to the flat file database. PaleoScan therefore works best when Input/Output to hard drives is optimized, either by working locally or through a network with the application and the memory disks at the same physical location. Using Solid State Drives with increased I/O speed will also improve performance.

PaleoScan can import 8/16 bit Segy data and then keeps the original data size. However, almost all the steps of the PaleoScan workflow will create 32 bit volumes (attribute computation, Model-Grid...). As a result, the output volume size is bigger (x2 if 16 bits, x4 if 8 bits) than the original volume.

It is probably a graphic card issue. The user needs to check in the computer settings that the right graphic card is assigned to PaleoScan.

The add-on module needs to be activated through an extension available with a specific license.

Go to the Extensions menu and click on the add-on module(s) to activate them.

The latest PaleoScan uses an updated FlexNet License system. This implies that the license server needs to be updated, the Eliis daemon can be found on our Download page.

In the installation folder of PaleoScan 2018, for example: "C:\Program Files\Eliis\PaleoScan\2018.1\licensing\eliis.exe"

On our website (you need a login and password to access our extranet): Download

To reduce the loading time, one advice is to upload your SEGY exactly where PaleoScan is installed on your computer (not next to your project, but next to your PaleoScan launcher) However, if you consider that it is still too long, you can try to import something smaller.

To avoid importing heavy seismic which would take time to load and take space, you have three options available during the importation process.

First, you can decimate your volume.

In the "Options" tab, you can change the bin/sample size.

For instance, with a set up at 1/2, it means that PaleoScan™ will load one line out of two for each direction (Inline, Xline and Time Slice). 

Depending on the resolution of your SEGY, you could apply for instance the following:

X-line resolution: 1/2

In-Line resolution: 1/2

For example, if your seismic has a bin size of 12.5 m, you will get a resolution of 25 m.

Moreover, another option can be useful to test your importation: Percentage of the file to import. By default, all the seismic is imported, you can choose to import only a lower percentage.

The Scan Trace Header option aims at only importing the survey without the seismic traces (very useful to know the seismic size!).

Secondly, you can crop your seismic defining the Min and Max values in every direction. These options are available from the “Zone of interest” tab.

A volume encoded in 8 bytes imported manually in PaleoScan, will be created/read in 8 bytes, and therefore the size of the volume will not change. However as soon as an object is created (grid, etc) from this volume, the new volume/object will be encoded in 32 bytes and so the size will be multiplied by 4.

By importing a volume from Petrel into PaleoScan with the plug-in, a volume of 8 bytes will be directly converted into 32 bytes in PaleoScan, and so the size of the volume will be multiplied by 4.

Approximations are made during this transfer via the Petrel connector, so it is normal to have a volume of a little different size than expected (for example: volume in 8 bytes of 24 GB in Petrel, should arrive in 32 bytes in PaleoScan with a size of 96 GB, but may have instead a size of 88.9 GB).

There are a couple of ways we could do this. You could Export the horizons from the Horizon Stack with X, Y, Z, and Data (Option 1), and you could extract each surface as individual horizons in your project and then transfer them to Petrel with the connector (Option 2). 

Option 1:

You can export the horizons from the Horizon Stack.

The option is available from: 

1a- The general toolbar, 

1b- The context menu of the horizon stack in the Project Browser 

1c- The horizon stack viewer.