With an amount of  51,661.00 US$ all the Hardware planned and detailed in the annexed list was purchased and properly installed. The premises were previously prepared by the local staff. In these rooms of ca.40 sq.m. the new machines have been located, connected, installed and tested. Because of the unique hardware Provider (Roy International), the operations have been carried out simply and successfully, with only a few problems solved soon. When the other Intas participants came to Moscow, they found an already ready-to-use seismic Lab., realized as our plan, with only few Hw & Sw missing elements: the processing software (matter of decision in those days), and the Internet connection, due to delay of the local provider.

Other part of the Intas funds have been reserved for the manpower. In fact the Seismic Group is supported by local employees and external Collaborators, for a total of 5 persons.  The locals are: Yuri G. Yurov (senior geophysicist, Leader of the Group), Nikolai Zavodnik (informatic, system Manager, part time 50%) and Olga Orlova (senior geophysicist, data-processing, 50%); the external part-time Collaborators are: Olga Makhova and Konstantin Zavodnik, students (first Geophysics, second Informatics, 50%). December'98 news: with agreement of the Co-ordinator, the local Team changed a little bit: K.Zavodnik went out, thanks Konstantin. Furthermore Natalia Subotcheva and Mstislav Ravkin (50%) entered. WELCOME !

Finally the Software question (both for data-acquisition and the following processing). The main criteria to follow were already agreed. Several commercial packages have been analysed. At last, we discovered a local reliable Company (the Synapse Scientific Centre, SSC) which fulfilled all our needs. In fact this Company:
l already successfully solved similar problems with other Russian public Research Institutions;
l got an Intas grant in '95 on the Caspian Sea seismic structure project;
l develops many scientific international relationships with qualified Partners (IRIS, LLNL, Columbia, Cambridge Univ.).
So, we went to Synapse and saw the good presentation of their software products. After an interactive demonstration, both the NIS participants convinced themselves to go deeper into its knowledge and to consider the possibility to purchase and use it for the purposes of our Project.