Cloud Computing and Big Data – Using the Southern California Earthquake Data Center (SCEDC) and the Southern California Seismic Network (SCSN) Products and Services for Earthquake Research

Ellen Yu, Prabha Acharya, Aparna Bhaskaran, Shang-Lin Chen, Jennifer R. Andrews, Valerie Thomas, Egill Hauksson, & Robert W. Clayton

Published August 14, 2018, SCEC Contribution #8492, 2018 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #057 (PDF)

Improved Data Access:

Looking for beta testers! The SCEDC is planning to store one month of continuous and triggered data in Amazon Web Services (s3) in preparation to store the SCEDC waveform archive as an Amazon Open Data Set. We are looking for users who will provide feedback and use cases on what development is needed. The potential benefits of hosting the archive in the cloud include:

1. Improved data access speed
2. Direct access to the archive as a mounted file system (may benefit large dataset analysis)
3. Leveraging AWS technologies and services.

The SCEDC has been determining ways to improve performance of the dataselect webservice. Reorganization of data into contiguous segments of a seismic channel improves download rates by a factor of 4.

The SCEDC is developing a data availability service. Users will be able to determine the time ranges for which triggered and continuous waveform time series are available for download. This service is compliant with the IRIS data availability service.


New data holdings:

The SCEDC data holdings now include a double difference catalog (Hauksson et. al 2011) spanning 1981 through 2017 available via STP and FDSN Event web service, and a focal mechanism catalog (Yang et al. 2011)

The SCEDC website now hosts training and validation datasets that are for deep learning research. (Ross et al. 2018)

To maximize data completeness, the SCEDC has implemented an automated gap detection and data retrieval mechanism for stations digitized by Basalt loggers with an onsite data store. This is effective when data could not be telemetered in real time due to a telemetry outage and service is later resumed.

Key Words
Seismology, Big Data, Cloud Computing

Citation
Yu, E., Acharya, P., Bhaskaran, A., Chen, S., Andrews, J. R., Thomas, V., Hauksson, E., & Clayton, R. W. (2018, 08). Cloud Computing and Big Data – Using the Southern California Earthquake Data Center (SCEDC) and the Southern California Seismic Network (SCSN) Products and Services for Earthquake Research. Poster Presentation at 2018 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Seismology