Eduardo Filpo, a senior geophysicist of the brazilian oil company, Petrobras, back to 90’s was the first guy to had the idea of developing an interface for seismic processing for academic purposes (To know a little about the history of GêBR interface, read document he wrote — A rescue of GêBR’s history, in Portugueses). That intention was the seed of the GêBR interface, a free software which provides an environment for geophysical data processing.
In 2007, Ricardo Biloti, assistant professor at University of Campinas, Brazil, rewrote GêBR interface from scratch and launched the GêBR Project. The first public version was released in 2007, during the 10th International Congress of Brazilian Geophysical Society, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The GêBR Project was initially proposed to develop and promote the GêBR interface. During 2007–2008, the core team of developers had offered several courses on seismic processing with GêBR, at the most active research centers in Geophysics in Brazil. Around 200 students and professionals have had direct contact with the project in that period. In that process we observed a demand for integration efforts among Brazilian geophysical community. That motivated the redefinition for the project’s goals.
The main objective of the GêBR Project is to stimulate the integration of the Brazilian Geophysical Community by providing an interface to geophysical data processing that could be used not only for teaching purposes but also as a research dissemination vehicle.
To produce the geophysical data processing interface GêBR, compliant with that idea, some characteristics are remarkable:
- GêBR interface, as well as all software produced by GêBR Project, is free-software, which means that everyone has access to it and is allowed to take full advantage of it, even by customizing it to his/her own uses, as long as the terms of GNU Public License are respected. This turns GêBR particularly suitable for course adoption, since all students are allowed to freely use it.
- GêBR is extensible in the sense that new functionalities can be easily added by means of an auxiliary interface, DéBR. The GêBR Project has the task of porting widely-used packages to GêBR, like Seismic Un*x, Madagascar, etc. However, as an interface to whatever program you might have, you has the right (and the means) to register such programs inside GêBR, which would then act as interface to them too. This means that researchers could use GêBR as a vehicle to distribute their programs to the hole community. To boost that dissemination of valueable programs, we support another project, ToSCo Project, which aims to gather those programs, take care of porting them to GêBR, and easily back distribute them to the community.
The main subprojects of the GêBR Project are:
- GêBR, the interface itself, responsible for manage projects and lines, assemble flows and submit them to execution, report their results back to the user, all in a fancy and easy way.
- DéBR, another graphical interface used to register or port programs to GêBR interface.
- GêBR daemon & maestro, this couple are the engine behind GêBR. They are responsible for running processing flows, whenever asked by GêBR interface, managing yielded jobs, and reporting their status back to GêBR interface. The maestro also coordinate all working nodes, compounding their computational power.
- LibGêBR, the common library to all other components.
- GêBR Live DVD, a linux distribution, based on Ubuntu, with all GêBR components and additional software pre-installed, providing a ready-to-use seismic data processing environment.
Despite software production, GêBR Project has also other iniatives:
- Offer short courses on geophysical data processing with GêBR, to spread the word. Get in contact to book one.
- Stimulate production of support material, like tutorials, presentations, books, examples, etc.
- Support to researchers interested in porting their programs to GêBR.