Case Study: TerraSpark Geosciences achieves 360x faster seismic processing with Panasas ActiveStor 14

Panasas® ActiveStor® Powers 3D Seismic Volume Interpretation

TerraSpark Geosciences needed a high-performance, easy-to-manage scale-out NAS platform to support development and test work for its Insight Earth software and to handle mixed workloads of very large seismic files and many small project files. The company also wanted to emulate real customer environments, improve collaboration, and avoid downtime for maintenance. Panasas and its ActiveStor 14 with the PanFS parallel file system were selected to meet these requirements.

Panasas implemented ActiveStor 14 with integrated SSDs, HDDs, ECC DRAM cache, and DirectFlow parallel access to automatically balance mixed file traffic and eliminate I/O bottlenecks. The results were dramatic: TerraSpark cut key processing time from five days to 20 minutes, a 360x acceleration for a 1GB 3D seismic volume, while streamlining workflows and achieving up to 150GB/s throughput with a path to scale capacity to 8PB.

TerraSpark Geosciences

Steve Dominguez

Systems Administrator, TerraSpark Geosciences