Using the SCEDC Cloud Archive for Research with Big Data

Session: Applications and Technologies in Large-Scale Seismic Analysis
Type: Oral
Date: 4/28/2020
Time: 11:15 AM
Room: 120 + 130
Description: 

The Southern California Earthquake Data Center (SCEDC) archives continuous and triggered waveform data from 609 seismic stations recorded by the Southern California Seismic Network. The SCEDC provides public access to earthquake parametric and waveform data through clients and webservices offered at https://scedc.caltech.edu.

“Big Data” research has resulted in a large increase in data requests to the SCEDC. To handle this, and take advantage of increasingly versatile and powerful computational resources that cloud vendors provide, the SCEDC has placed a copy of its waveform archive in the AWS cloud as an Amazon Open Data Set. https://scedc.caltech.edu/cloud/ This poster will show how cloud hosted archives can increase the speed of scientific research. It will also present examples of data analysis and costs incurred with a cloud computing.

We have uploaded our continuous archive (1999-present), the earthquake catalog and CI network metadata into the Open Data Set. We plan to put the triggered archive (1977-present) and phase data into the cloud archive. AWS bucket name is s3://scedc-pds and it is hosted in the US West (Oregon) region.

To minimize the learning curve for users, we chose data formats familiar to most users of the archive and a file/directory naming convention that would allow users to perform time based and channel based searches. Waveform files are in miniSEED format. Earthquake parametric data are stored in csv formats.

Presenting Author: Ellen Yu

Authors