Inside an oil industry datacentre

PGS ship Ramform Sovereign

Early in February, ZDNet UK took the opportunity to visit a datacentre that processes geological information for the oil and gas industry. The facility, operated by Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS), crunches seismic data gathered by a fleet of ships spread across the globe.

The Ramform Sovereign, pictured, is one of PGS's 16 seismic survey vessels. It uses seismic survey techniques to hunt for oil and gas deposits beneath the surface of the oceans. The data gathered generates a 3D picture of the areas surveyed, which are then parcelled off into cubes for analysis — analogous to grid squares on a map.

The generated data is "like a CAT scan of the earth. There's huge amounts of data in each 3D cube, and we process it to fine-tune the internal image and then you can slice and dice it any way you like", PGS's global datacentre manager, Mike Turff, told ZDNet UK. "It's similar to medical scans but we do it on a much larger basis. The more work you do on refining the image, the better and more accurate it is going to be."

Each vessel stores the data gleaned from its explorations and then does a "fair amount of processing onboard — obviously you want to do the quality control out there and make sure it's good enough to properly process, because that's the only time [the ships] will be able to turn around and go back", Turff said.

Once the data is processed, the results are stored on tapes, which are sent to land by helicopter and couriered to one of PGS's 21 worldwide processing facilities. Of these, three are dubbed 'megacentres' and are designed for the most strenuous processing tasks. They stand at the top of PGS's datacentre hierarchy. As part of a planned tour of international datacentres, ZDNet UK got the chance to visit the European one, located in Weybridge, Surrey.

Photo credit: Petroluem Geo-Services

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Want to know more about PGS's 'lunatic fringe' computing? Read ZDNet UK's datacentre tour diary.