Global Availability
INSP provides a software infrastructure that enables geologists and geophysicists to have direct control of depth-imaging projects and to have access to remote large-scale parallel computers, as effortlessly and effectively as if they were employing a workstation linked to their local-area network. This overcomes the economical and operational obstacles that often prevent many exploration projects in difficult areas from fully benefiting from high-performance computing and advanced processing algorithms.

Java Client-Server
Under the INSP model, the geophysicist does not have to concern himself with operating systems, software versions, which software to buy, or which hardware to buy. The geophysicist can concentrate on science and exploration goals, not get bogged-down with computer issues. The client-server package is written entirely in Java, which makes it completely portable. All that it is required for INSP to run is the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed on both the server and client machine. Most recent operating system distributions come with JRE preinstalled, and for those that do not, it can be easily downloaded from the web. Running the INSP interface application as an applet eliminates the need for software upgrades on the client side.

INSP is a targeted seismic solution which includes a graphical user interface, seismic applications, and a flexible and dynamic system. The GUI is written in the Java programming language, allowing client portability and access from any type of computer on either a local or wide-area network. This takes advantage of the fact that Java was designed specifically with networking in mind and is capable of dealing with security and parallel distributed computing - both of which are key issues for geophysical applications.

The Java client-server design of INSP allows us to leverage the "write once, run anywhere'' capabilities for the GUI and process management while using highly optimized seismic imaging algorithms running on specialized high performance computers for the number-crunching tasks. The computational modules, launched by the Java server, are written in C and Fortran to take full advantage of the computational efficiency offered by those languages.

Portable Interpretation/Processing Client
The client has two main functional modules: one is the Information Browser/WorkflowBuilder used to construct and manage (execute, interrupt, stop) flows, the other one is the DataViewer, which can display seismic sections, velocity models, gathers and semblance data sets. The DataViewer allows direct data interaction such as picking and velocity model building and editing. The core of the graphics is based on the Java Graphics subsystem. The Java Graphics subsystem API is a generic, low-level API that covers a broad spectrum of graphics, and is designed to serve all manner of graphics needs. It provides the underlying support for graphics on the Java platform. Swing, used to build the GUI relies on the Java Graphics subsystem API for all drawing operations.