A High Performance Virtualized Seismic Data Acquisition System

Abstract:

As part of a collaborative effort with the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, a virtualized seismic data acquisition and processing system was recently installed at the Centro Sismológical Nacional (CSN) at the Universidad de Chile for use as part of their early warning system. Using lessons learned from the Earthscope Transportable Array project, the design of this system consists of dedicated acquisition, processing and data distribution nodes hosted on a high availability hypervisor cluster. Data is exchanged with the IRIS Data Management Center and the existing processing infrastructure at the CSN. The processing nodes are backed by 20 TB of hybrid Solid State Disk (SSD) and spinning disk storage with automatic tiering of data between the disks. As part of the installation, best practices for station metadata maintenance were discussed and applied to the existing IRIS sponsored stations, as well as over 30 new stations being added to the early warning network.

Four virtual machines (VM) were configured with distinctive tasks. Two VMs are dedicated to data acquisition, one to the real-time data processing, and one as relay between data acquisition and processing systems with services for the existing earthquake revision and dissemination infrastructure. The first acquisition system connects directly to Basalt dataloggers and Q330 digitizers, managing them, and acquiring seismic data as well as state-of-health (SOH) information. As newly deployed stations become available (beyond the existing 30), this VM is configured to acquire data from them and incorporate the additonal data. The second acquisition system imports the legacy network of CSN and data streams provided by other data centers. The processing system is connected to the production and archive databases. The relay system merges all incoming data streams and obtains the processing results. Data and processing packets are available for subsequent review and dissemination by the CSN. Such configuration enhances the overall system in terms of operation and maintainability.