Speaker
Mr
Gael Youinou
(Unknown)
Description
Worldwide population faces difficult challenges for the coming years to produce
enough energy to sustain global growth and predict main evolutions of the Earth such
as earthquakes. Seismic data processing and reservoir simulation are key
technologies to help researchers in geosciences to tackle these challenges.
Modern seismic data processing and geophysical simulations require greater amounts
of computing power, data storage and sophisticated software. The research community
hardly keeps pace with this evolution, resulting in difficulties for small or medium
research centres to exploit their innovative algorithms.
Grid Computing is an opportunity to foster sharing of computer resources and give
access to large computing power for a limited period of time at an affordable cost,
as well as sharing data and sophisticated software.
The capability to solve new complex problems and validate innovative algorithms on
real scale problems is also a way to attract and keep the brightest researchers for
the benefit of both the academic and industrial R&D geosciences communities.
Under the “umbrella” of the EGEE Infrastructure project was created
EGEODE, “Expanding Geosciences On Demand” Open Virtual Organization.
EGEODE is dedicated to research in geosciences for both public and private
industrial research & development and academic laboratories.
The Geocluster software, which includes several tools for signal processing,
simulation and inversion, enables researchers to process seismic data and to explore
the composition of the Earth's layers. In addition to Geocluster, which is used only
for R&D, CGG (http://www.cgg.com ) develops, markets and supports a broad range of
geosciences software systems covering seismic data acquisition and processing, as
well as geosciences interpretation and data management.
Many typical Grid Computing projects aim pure Research domains in infrastructure,
middleware and usage such as High Energy Physics, Bio informatics, Earth
Observation. EGEODE moves the focus towards collaboration between Industry and
Academia.
There are two main potential impacts:
1 - The transfer of know-how and services to industry.
2 - The consolidation and extension of EGEODE community, which includes both
industrial and academic research centres.
The general benefits of grid computing are:
- Access to computing resources without investing in large IT infrastructure.
- Optimise IT infrastructure
o Load balancing between Processing Centres
o Smoothing peaks of production
o Service continuity; Business Continuity Plan
o Better fault tolerant system and applications
o Leverage Processing Centres capacity
- Lower the total cost of IT by sharing available resources with other members of the
community.
And the specific benefits for the Research community:
- Easy access to academic software and comprehensive, industrial software.
- Free the researcher from the additional burden of managing IT hardware and software
complexity and limitations.
- Create a framework to share data and project resources with other teams across
Europe and worldwide.
- Share best practices, support, and expertises.
- Enable cross-organizational teamwork and partnership.
Some of these benefits have been demonstrated through other Grid Projects and need
to be validated in our Geosciences community. Sharing IT resources and Data is
typically the primary goal of a Grid Project. Early indicators in our V.O. show that
facilitating access to software and simplifying management of hardware and software
complexity are also extremely important.
Author
Mr
Gael Youinou
(Unknown)
