Prof.Dr. Nezihi CANITEZ Geophysical Data Processing Laboratory

Since 1996, with the contributions of MTA, DPT, TÜBİTAK projects and the contributions of our donor, late Prof.Dr. Turhan Taner, the seismic data collected in sea and land areas are processed, analyzed and interpreted in the “Nezihi Canıtez Data Processing Laboratory”. It is possible to process and evaluate two-dimensional or three-dimensional seismic data by applying conventional and unconventional data processing techniques to seismic data.

The laboratory is the third one in Turkey following Turkish Petroleum Company and TÜBİTAK-MAM similar laboratories. ITU is one of the three universities in Turkey that owns such a facility. This laboratory serves to graduate and undergraduate students, courses and research projects.

Following the 1999 devastating Earthquakes in Marmara Region, this laboratory has assumed special responsibility of processing marine seismic and bathymetric data related to the active tectonics of the Marmara Sea. Until today, these studies continued with the processing and interpretation of seismic data collected both in Turkish seas and international waters. These studies, carried out with the infrastructure of “Nezihi Canıtez Data Processing Laboratory”, provide our department with leadership and competitive power in its field in national and international studies.

Hardware profile in the Geophysical Data Processing Laboratory:

- One Workstation with 'ECHOS' Seismic Data Processing software,
- Computers with Linux and Windows operating systems,
- Scanner, Thermal printer, Color and black/white laser printers. 

Software profile in the Geophysical Data Processing Laboratory:

- AspenTech 'Echos' Seismic Data Processing Package on workstation. This industry standard seismic data processing package is open to undergraduate and graduate students during their graduating project studies, department courses and research projects.
- Seismic Micro Technologies (SMT) Kingdom Suite Seismic Data Interpretation Package (v. 8.4): This industry standard seismic data interpretation package is open to undergraduate and graduate students during their graduating project studies, department courses and research projects.
- Operating systems: Windows and Linux
- Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) mapping software

Acknowledgments

We thank Prof.Dr. Turhan Taner for his contributions in the establishment of the “Turhan Taner” Seismic Data Processing workstation.

We thank Schlumberger for donation of Petrel Geophysics module to our department.

We thank Schlumberger for donation of Petromod Software to our department.

We thank AspenTech for donation of Echos Seismic Data Processing Software, Geodepth Migration and Velocity Modelling Software and ComprehensiveAttr Software to our department

We thank IHS Global Incorporation for donation of Kingdom Seismic and Geological Interpretation Software to our department.

We thank OGS (National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics, Italy) for donation of CAT3D,  Seismic Reflection Tomography Software to our department.

We thank TPAO for installation and updating of Paradigm Echos Seismic Data Processing Software to our department.

Applied Geophysics Laboratory 

The Applied Geophysics laboratory was established for the education of undergraduates and a storage place of geophysical instruments and their supplies. The field geophysics experiments have been carried out by using basic geophysical instruments belongs to this laboratory. The laboratory needs some new geophysical instruments such as 24-channel seismic recorder, gravimeter and ground penetrating radar. In addition, a large space for laboratory and spare parts of the existing geophysical instruments are necessary to achieve major geophysical engineering practices during the undergraduate education.

Palaeomagnetism Laboratory

The laboratory was established in 1973 by the joint work between the Faculty of Mines of the Istanbul Technical University and Kandilli Observatory and called “KANTEK”. The location of laboratory is in the campus of the Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute, Çengelköy. The main goal of this laboratory is to investigate the crustal and lithospheric scale movements in Turkey and surrounding area and understand the tectonic processes in the geologic past by using the paleomagnetic rock samples.

Up to date, many research projects were run such as Rotation of Kırşehir Massif; Paleomagnetic properties of the Almancık Mountain; Investigation of neotectonic regime of the western Anatolia and Thrace by the paleomagnetic studies; the neotectonic evaluation of the eastern edge of the Çankırı Basin. Also, this laboratory was used by the undergraduate students for the laboratory experiments required by their graduation project. Currently, the paleomagnetic experiments can be done on both volcanic and sedimentary rocks in the other institutes. However, the present instruments in KANTEK paleomagnetism laboratory are only appropriate for the experiments done on the volcanic rocks. Many geologic and tectonic problems can be solved by using modern instruments which are suitable for the experiments for the sedimentary rocks.

Seismology Laboratory 

The undergraduate students can obtain the seismological data from the national (Kandilli Earthquake and Research Institute, KOERI, the Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey, TUBİTAK et al.) and international institutions (USGS-NEIC, ISC, Harvard-CMT, IRIS, ORFEUS, ERI-Tokyo et al.). By using these compiled earthquake data catalogues and digital wave forms, the undergraduate students mainly work on the problems of seismotectonics and seismicity. There are a few seismological instruments (microtremor, strong motion, and broad-band 3 component seismometer) in the laboratory obtained from the research projects. The infrastructure of the laboratory was renewed.

Computational Geophysics Laboratory

A high performance computing system is delivered and the infrastucture studies are in progress.  The project to establish this laboratory has been initiated by Dr. Ayşe Kaşlılar in 2008. The project is supported by Shell Co. and partly by ITU Scientific Research Funds. This initiative is appreciated by Dr. Özdoğan (Oz) Yılmaz, the CEO of Anatolian Geophysical Co., and he also donated a second high performance computing system to the laboratory. Both systems are specially designed for High-Performance Computational (HPC) tasks running under the Linux operating system.

This laboratory will be the first example in a Geophysical Engineering Department in Turkey. Both graduate and undergraduate students will benefit from this laboratory during 2D and 3D modeling of wave phenomena and code development for forward and inverse solutions in geophysics. Moreover, the laboratory will be used by other research groups studying subsurface imaging at scales ranging from meters to whole-Earth dimensions.

First system (delivered by Shell Company project):
- Hewlett Packard SMP Server DL580G5
- 4 x Intel Xeon 2.13 GHz Quad Core CPU
- 48 GB PC2-5300 RAM
- 4 x 300 GB 10K SAS HDD
- 24 Port Gigabit Ethetnet Switch

Second system (donated by Anatolian Geophysical Company):
It consists of 9 compute nodes including a master node with the following specifications:
- Appro HyperBlade Mini-Cluster
- 2 x Intel Xeon 3.0 GHz CPUs per node
- 4 GB ECC DDR memory per node
- 2 x 320 GB HDD (master node)
- 250 GB HDD (slave nodes)
- High-speed (gigabit) interconnection between nodes.