Laurent Clerc, Vice President Information Technology, Processing, Imaging & Reservoir, CGG, discussed the appliances of Moonshot to their industry niche at HP’s launch event in New York City with the Cube’s Dave Vellante and John Furrier.

CGG is a geophysical services provider, “we acquire, process, and deliver images of the underground,” Clerc explained, one of the main purposes being to discover oil and gas that can then be exploited.

The infrastructure and applications CGG uses are built to process a fairly large amount of data. The collected data is processed and refined to obtain an image of the underground that can be properly used and delivered to clients. This business model requires dedicated software which CGG designs for itslef, but also a lot of processing capacity. The activity is typical for high performance computing environments.

“We use thousands of servers,” Clerc explained, with about 40 sites doing processing, all designed to do number crunching for large amounts of data. “We own the software and we try to develop it to work well with the hardware we require.”

Clerc says that when designing software, the CGG IT team had to take into consideration the existing constraints imposed by the architecture. Moonshot “brings a box of components,” enabling companies to choose the hardware that would work with the software they need to develop.

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Moonshot’s hyper-scalability : out of this world

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In terms of scale requirements, Clerc explained that typically their infrastructure implies tens of terabytes of storage. CGG runs large sites, not as big or complex of those employed by web servers, but right behind them. The sites are “dedicated to number crunching,” doing a CPU intensive data processing type of activity. Moonshot’s flexible infrastructure helps address a lot of their typical problems.

Commenting on Moonshot’s power-saving characteristics, Clerc explained that it is quite expensive to power such a large infrastructure, and electricity had to be used carefully. Everything that saves power has an advantage, as it helps produce the best quality services for customers in a cost-conscious manner.

CGG works with a diversity of suppliers, not just HP, and selects them based on the technology they bring to the table. When it comes to Moonshot, “we couldn’t afford to pass the opportunity,” Clerc stated.

“Moonshot means you get something where I can put everything I want.” If there is somethign a company wants and can’t find it, they can go to a hardware provider and ask for it, to then integrate it with Moonshot.

“We are a niche market,” Clerc said, and no one will develop specifically for such a field. “If we can piggy back on technology developed for other markets, we will seize the opportunity.”

Commenting on the overall HP Moonshot announcement, Clerc explained that this new hyperscale server allows people to actually put their toes into water and figure out how it can work for them. “It’s a risk free operation,” as companies work with HP and decide how the technology can be used in their field.

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