Cloud Claritas offloads seismic processing to Amazon Web Services

PALO ALTO, Calif., June 20 — GreenButton, the leading provider of Cloud Computing software, today announced a two-way partnership with New Zealand's GNS Science and Houston based Stillwater Group to leverage the cloud for complex seismic processing. The solution called "Cloud Claritas" builds on GNS Science's world class Globe Claritas software and offloads the compute intensive seismic processing to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud platform. Seismic processing is fundamental to the discovery of oil & gas and requires vast amounts of processing power to analyze the large volumes of data.

"This is GreenButton's first High Performance Computing (HPC) workload running on AWS, and demonstrates its ability to burst to multiple cloud platforms," remarked Scott Houston, GreenButton's CEO. "The port of GreenButton's HPC platform to the AWS platform was achieved in four developer-weeks providing important validation of the company's cloud-agnostic architecture".

An average 3D seismic dataset can be 5 – 10 terabytes and can take hundreds of thousands of compute hours during a project to build an image of the sub-surface structure. The solution uses Amazon's high performance cluster compute nodes, and incorporates the use of Red Hat's Gluster file system to manage the massive datasets. The Gluster software solution provides a clustered file system that supports the necessary I/O throughput required to scale the seismic processing to thousands of cores.

"We see this solution as being a game-changer for enterprises in the Oil and Gas industry," said Guy Maslen, chief operations officer of GLOBE Claritas. "Access to this vast power has normally been reserved for the heavyweights in the industry and with this solution now being readily available, we know this will empower the independents."

"I see this as the culmination of a shared vision over the past years to provide a service offering that accomplishes lowering the capital infrastructure barrier for startups; leveling the playing field for organizations deep in expertise but unable to reach higher and broader into their opportunity base because of compute cycle limitations and; leveraging the options available for rapid growth plans for all organizations - turning the spigot up and down as needed," said Stacey Horne, Stillwater President and Founder. "I look forward to leading the business charge on this exciting new development in an industry that thrives on innovation."

Sales and Partnership Inquiries: Please contact Stillwater Group at 281-783-1302 or CloudClaritas(at)stillwatergroup(dot)com.

About GreenButton Limited

GreenButton is an award winning global software company that specializes in high performance cloud computing. The company provides a cloud platform for development and delivery of software and services that enable independent software vendors (ISVs) to move to the cloud and for their users to access cloud resources. GreenButton is Microsoft Corp's 2011 Windows Azure ISV Partner of the Year and the company is has offices in New Zealand, Palo Alto and Seattle.

Cloud computing is a growing phenomenon, projected by industry analysts to exceed US$160billion, but end users and vendors are struggling with engagement models and portal interfaces. GreenButton has developed an intelligent interface (an API) called the "GreenButton" which enables the user to access this capacity whenever it is required, directly from their desktop application. For more information, visit http://www.greenbutton.com

About GLOBE Claritas

GLOBE Claritas is a complete 2D/3D seismic data processing solution produced by GNS Science an independent, government-owned research company, with over 140 years of experience in earth sciences. GNS Science is New Zealand's leading supplier of earth and isotope scientific research and consultancy services. For more information please see http://www.globeclaritas.com and http://www.gns.cri.nz.

About Stillwater Group

Stillwater Group has been planted in the middle of the intersection of business, technology and the Oil and Gas industry since our formation in the late 90's. Our client list ranges from the largest (Exxon Mobil, Rio Tinto) through small startups with a vision and passion.

Our involvement with the other principals in the Cloud Claritas offering date back to 2005 as Stillwater serves as North American reseller for Globe Claritas, and has worked closely with GreenButton (and its predecessors); both on large scale processing contracts and business development efforts.

Stillwater Group is an independent operating company within the Noel Group of companies. http://www.stillwatergroup.com and http://www.noel-group.com.

About Gluster

Gluster is a leading provider of open source storage solutions for public, private and hybrid clouds. Over 150 enterprises worldwide have used Gluster in commercial deployments ranging from a few terabytes to multiple petabytes, across the most demanding applications in digital media delivery, healthcare, Internet, energy and biotech. Gluster was recently acquired by Red Hat. Visit us at http://www.gluster.com.

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Source: GreenButton Limited