Quick Search:    advanced search

GSW Home   GeoRef Home   My GSW Alerts   Contact GSW   About GSW   Journals List   Help

This Article Figures Only Full Text Full Text (PDF) Submit a response Alert me when this article is cited Alert me when eLetters are posted Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Gibson, G. Search for Related Content GeoRef GeoRef Citation

Optimizing performance

Object storage for seismic applications

Panasas, Fremont, California, U.S.

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

Political instability at many points of the world ... rising gasoline prices ... limited natural gas and oil reserves. These are just a few of the challenges facing the oil and gas industry as it attempts to keep pace with the energy demands of an increasingly developed world. In this quest to supply the globe, it's no surprise that a growing number of energy companies rely upon technological advances to increase their efficiency and productivity. Nowhere is this more evident than seismic data acquisition and processing capabilities, where 4D seismic and other advanced imaging techniques are giving geophysicists more opportunities to accurately analyze the earth's subsurface to make predictions on where and when to drill.

Complementing these recent developments has been the advent of Linux compute clusters, which give affordable and extremely powerful computing capabilities to handle the demands of these advanced imaging techniques. These clusters have forever changed the high-performance computing landscape but the storage capabilities have not kept up with the cluster's demands for massive data bandwidth. But today, an object-based storage architecture offers a solution in which the storage system's scalability and price-performance can match that of the Linux clusters.

Current network storage systems have been simply incapable of providing the data throughput needed to keep Linux clusters operating efficiently. Each of the two major types is distinguished by its command sets. . . . [Full Text of this Article]