The Situation
Reed Tool began using PV-WAVE to analyze the research and development laboratory's drilling simulator data. At that time a minicomputer, the Digital Equipment Corporation VAX/VMS system was selected as the deployment platform. By the mid-1990s, R&D had decided to migrate to personal computers (PCs), and in late 1997, as the transition to PCs began, engineers needed PC-based software that could access data from both VAX and PC servers.

The Challenge
Engineers at the R&D laboratory in Houston collect and analyze enormous amounts of data from drilling simulations to test their oil field products. Parameters such as RPM, load, pressure, displacement and time from 18 channels are captured at rates up to 100 scans per second for up to 100 hours. The data is compiled, stored, then later accessed, charted and compared to previous test data. Since the data files are so massive, containing as many as 86,400 records with as much as 5 Mbytes of data, raw data is often stored in binary format, which reduces the data file size but makes it difficult to access and convert. Additionally, comparisons of test results sometimes require engineers to open and convert up to eight large files simultaneously, and the data must be accessed from PCs as well as the VAX system.

The Solution
Visual Numerics provides industry-leading, mission-critical software solutions to more than 350,000 business and technical professionals around the world. Scientists, researchers, educators, engineers, developers, intranet managers, testers and analysts use Visual Numerics' decision-support tools to solve problems, identify trends and share results.

Engineers from Reed Tool evaluated several software packages, however, the other software products were unable to open up the files or convert the raw data efficiently. As a result, Reed Tool contacted Visual Numerics for both software and technical support. Visual Numerics staff worked with Frank Hall, Reed Tool's R&D lab supervisor, for three days. Using a PC version of PV-WAVE, Frank was able to adapt the existing VAX program to operate on a PC platform and open up files resident on the VAX -- in only one hour.

Results
"Visual Numerics' PV-WAVE enables us to handle our data on a PC unlike any other software on the market. The other packages we evaluated didn't offer the utilities of PV-WAVE and were incapable of reading the huge files of raw data and converting them quickly and easily," says Hall. "It is essential for me to read both old and new data files from either the VAX or Windows platform so I can keep work moving while we migrate to PCs. PV-WAVE gave me that flexibility." He adds, "At Reed Tool, we collect and analyze enormous amounts of data, and PV-WAVE gives us the ability to understand and compare this data in ways that other companies may not even consider. In my opinion, PV-WAVE is the most powerful data analysis software available today."