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AWS

Nov 30 2021

INT Achieves AWS Energy Competency Status

This announcement highlights INT as an AWS Partner with deep industry expertise and follows a rigorous technical validation process and customer reference audit.

INT announced today that it has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Energy Competency status. This designation recognizes that INT has demonstrated deep expertise helping customers leverage AWS cloud technology to transform complex systems and accelerate the transition to a sustainable energy future.

Achieving the AWS Energy Competency differentiates INT as an AWS Partner with deep expertise and technical proficiency within this unique industry, including proven customer success developing solutions across the value chain, from production operations and optimization to new energy solutions, and more.

To receive the designation, AWS Partners undergo a rigorous technical validation process, including a customer reference audit. The AWS Energy Competency provides energy customers the ability to more easily select skilled Partners to help accelerate their digital transformations with confidence.


“INT is extremely proud to achieve the AWS Energy Competency designation,” said Olivier Lhemann, President at INT. “Our team is dedicated to helping our customers accelerate their transformation to the cloud by leveraging our platform, IVAAP, which offers complex subsurface visualization, dashboarding, and collaboration capabilities—all accessed seamlessly in the cloud with AWS.”


AWS is enabling scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions from startups to global enterprises. To support the seamless integration and deployment of these solutions, AWS established the AWS Competency Program to help customers identify AWS Partners with deep industry experience and expertise.

INT helps energy companies accelerate the development of energy digital solutions by embedding complex data visuals with IVAAP visualization platform in the cloud. INT works closely with over 100 energy companies such as TGS, a provider of a diverse range of Energy Data for more than 40 years.


“Our partnership with INT and the integration of IVAAP with our ecommerce/cloud platform allowed us to greatly reduce our time to market while delivering robust visualization tools that our clients wanted,” said Jim Burke, Software Development Manager at TGS. “Now, our clients can not only visualize log data, but they can also perform analytics—all on AWS.”


Filed Under: IVAAP Tagged With: AWS, energy, ivaap

Mar 24 2021

INT Supports The Open Group OSDU™ Forum Mercury Release with Advanced Domain Data Visualization in the Cloud

As a long-standing OSDU Forum Member, INT has worked closely with the OSDU development teams to ensure seamless integration of IVAAP visualization of OSDU data on all major cloud providers.

Houston, TX – March 24, 2021 – INT is pleased to announce our partnership with The Open Group OSDU™ Forum as part of the new Mercury Release. INT’s flagship data visualization platform, IVAAP, offers a unique way for operators to search, explore, interact with, and automate their data on OSDU in a single platform in the cloud. 

Developed by The Open Group OSDU™ Forum, the OSDU Data Platform is an Open Source, standards-based and technology-agnostic data platform for the energy industry that stimulates innovation, industrializes data management, and reduces time to market for new solutions.

For companies adopting OSDU, IVAAP is a powerful, fast, and cost-effective alternative to custom building an application or assembling multiple components to visualize domain data. INT partners with all major cloud providers that support OSDU — AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and RedHat OpenShift by IBM. And it includes multiple customization options, including an SDK to provide a complete, end-to-end visualization solution.


Olivier Lhemann, founder and president of INT, explains: “As more energy companies transition their data and workflows to the cloud, it’s more important than ever to have a common data standard. Our work with OSDU is critical to helping companies solve the challenge of interoperability, of viewing their data from a single application, eliminating silos and liberating workflows. IVAAP is a universal cloud viewer that significantly reduces time to market and accelerates the adoption of innovative technologies.”


To learn more about IVAAP and how it works with OSDU, visit INT.com/IVAAP.

Read the full press release on PRWeb.

About INT:

INT software empowers the energy companies to visualize their complex data (seismic, well log, reservoir, and schematics in 2D/3D). INT offers a visualization platform (IVAAP) and libraries (GeoToolkit) that developers can use with their data ecosystem to deliver subsurface solutions (Exploration, Drilling, Production). INT’s powerful HTML5/JavaScript technology can be used for data aggregation, API services, high-performance visualization of G&G and petrophysical data in a browser. INT simplifies complex subsurface data visualization.

About The Open Group

The Open Group is a global consortium that enables the achievement of business objectives through technology standards. Our diverse membership of more than 800 organizations includes customers, systems and solutions suppliers, tool vendors, integrators, academics, and consultants across multiple industries. For more information, visit www.opengroup.org.

INT, the INT logo, and IVAAP are trademarks of Interactive Network Technologies, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries.

 

Open Subsurface Data Universe™ and OSDU™ are trademarks of The Open Group.

Filed Under: IVAAP, Press Release Tagged With: AWS, cloud, IBM, ivaap, Microsoft, open group, OSDU

Nov 20 2020

A New Era in O&G: Critical Components of Bringing Subsurface Data to the Cloud

The oil and gas industry is historically one of the first industries generating actionable data in the modern sense. For example, the first seismic imaging was done in 1932 by John Karcher.

 

first-seismic
Seismic dataset in 1932.

 

Since that first primitive image, seismic data has been digitized and has grown exponentially in size. It is usually represented in monolith data sets which may span in size from a couple of gigabytes to petabytes if pre-stack. 

seismic-faults
Seismic datasets today.

 

The long history, large amount of data, and the nature of the data pose unique challenges that often make it difficult to take advantage of advancing cloud technology. Here is a high-level overview of the challenges of working with oil and gas data and some possible solutions to help companies take advantage of the latest cloud technologies. 

Problems with Current Data Management Systems

Oil and Gas companies are truly global companies, and the data is often distributed among multiple disconnected systems in multiple locations. This not only makes it difficult to find and retrieve data when necessary but also makes it difficult to know what data is available and how useful it is. This often requires person-to-person communication, and some data may even be in offline systems or on someone’s desk.

The glue between those systems is data managers who are amazing at what they do but still introduce a human factor to the process. They have to understand which dataset is being requested, then search for it on various systems, and finally deliver it to the original requester. How much does this process take? You guessed it—way too much! And in the end, the requester may realize that it’s not the data they were hoping to get, and the whole process is back to square one.

After the interpretation and exploration process, decisions are usually made on the basis of data screenshots and cherry-picked views, which limit the ability of specialists to make informed decisions. Making bad decisions based on incomplete or limited data can be very expensive. This problem would not exist if the data was easily accessible in real-time. 

And that doesn’t even factor in collaboration between teams and countries. 

How can O&G and service companies manage
their massive subsurface datasets better
by leveraging modern cloud technologies?

3 Key Components of Subsurface Data Lake Implementation

There are three critical components of a successful subsurface data lake implementation: a strong cloud infrastructure, a common data standard, and robust analysis and visualization capabilities. 

 

3-key-components

 

AWS: Massive Cloud Architecture

While IVAAP is compatible with any cloud provider—along with on-premise and hybrid installations—AWS offers a strong distributed cloud infrastructure, reliable storage, compute, and more than 150 other services to empower cloud workflows. 

OSDU: Standardizing Data for the Cloud

The OSDU Forum is an Energy Industry Forum formed to establish an open subsurface Reference Architecture, including a cloud-native subsurface data platform reference architecture, with usable implementations for major cloud providers. It includes Application Standards (APIs) to ensure that all applications (microservices), developed by various parties, can run on any OSDU data platform, and it leverages Industry Data Standards for frictionless integration and data access. The goal of OSDU is to bring all existing formats and standards under one umbrella which can be used by everyone, while still supporting legacy applications and workflows. 

IVAAP: Empowering Data Visualization

A data visualization and analysis platform such as IVAAP, which is the third key component to a successful data lake implementation, provides industry-leading tools for data discovery, visualization, and collaboration. IVAAP also offers integrations with various Machine Learning and artificial intelligence workflows, enabling novel ways of working with data in the cloud.

ivaap-benefits

 

Modern Visualization — The Front End to Your Data

To visualize seismic data, as well as other types of data, in the cloud, INT has developed a native web visualization platform called IVAAP. IVAAP consists of a front-end client application as well as a backend. The backend takes care of accessing, reading, and preparing data for visualization. The client application provides a set of widgets and UI components empowering search, visualization, and collaboration for its users. The data reading and other low-level functions are abstracted from the client by a Domain API, and work through connector microservices on the backend. To provide support for a new data type, you only need to create a new connector. Both parts provide an SDK for developers, and some other perks as well. 

Compute Close to Your Data

Once the data is in the cloud, a variety of services become available. For example, one of them is ElasticSearch from AWS, which helps index the data and provides a search interface. Another service that becomes available is AWS EC2, which provides compute resources that are as distributed as the data is. That’s where IVAAP gets installed.

One of the cloud computing principles is that data has a lot of gravity and all the computing parts tend to get closer to it. This means that it is better to place the processing computer as close to the data as possible. With AWS EC2, we at INT can place our back end very close to the data, regardless of where it is in the world, minimizing latency for the user and enabling on-demand access. Elastic compute resources also enable us to scale up when the usage increases and down when fewer users are active.

 

AWS-INT

All of this works together to make your data on-demand—when the data needs to be presented, all the tools and technologies mentioned above come into play, visualizing the necessary data in minutes, or even seconds, with IVAAP dashboards and templates. And of course, the entire setup is secure on every level. 

Empower Search and Discovery

The next step is to make use of this data. And to do so, we need to provide users a way to discover it. What should be made searchable, how to set up a search, and how to expose the search to the users? 

Since searching through numerical values of the data won’t provide a lot of discovery potential, we need some additional metadata. This metadata is extracted along with the data and also uploaded to the cloud. All of it or a subset of metadata is then indexed using AWS Elasticsearch. IVAAP uses an Elasticsearch connector to the search, as well as tools to invoke the search through an interactive map interface or filter forms presented to the user.

How can you optimize web performance of massive domain datasets?

Visualizing Seismic Datasets on the Web

There are two very different approaches to visualizing data. One is to do it on the server and send rendered images to the client. This process lacks interactivity, which limits the decisions that can be made from those views. The other option is to send data to the client and visualize it on the user’s machine. IVAAP implements either approach. 

While the preferred method—sending data to the client’s machine—provides limitless interactivity and responsiveness of the visuals, it also poses a special challenge: the data is just too big. Transferring terabytes of data from the server to the user would mean serious problems. So how do we solve this challenge? 

First, it is important to understand that not all the data is always visible. We can calculate which part of the data is visible on the user’s screen at any given moment and only request that part. Some of the newer data formats are designed to operate with such reads and provide ways to do chunk reads out of the box. A lot of legacy data formats—for example, SEG-Y—are often unstructured. To properly calculate and read the location of the desired chunk, we need to first have a map—called an Index—that is used to calculate the offset and the size of chunks to be read. Even then, the data might still be too large. 

Luckily, we don’t always need the whole resolution. If a user’s screen is 3,000 pixels wide, they won’t be able to display all 6,000 traces, so we can then adaptively decrease the number of traces to provide for optimal performance.

reduce-pixels

Often the chunks which we read are in different places in the file, making it necessary to do multiple reads at the same time. Luckily, both S3 storage and IVAAP support such behavior. We can fire off thousands of requests in parallel, maximizing the efficiency of the network. Live it to the full, as some people like to say. And even then, once the traces are picked and ready to ship, we do some vectorized compression before shipping the data to the client. 

We were talking about legacy file formats here, but it’s worth mentioning that GPU compression is also available for newer file formats like VDS/OpenVDS and ZGY/OpenZGY. It’s worth mentioning that the newer formats provide perks like brick storage format, random access patterns, adaptive level of detail, and more.

Once the data reaches the client, JavaScript and Web Assembly technologies come together to decompress the data. The data is then presented to the user using the same technologies through some beautiful widgets, providing interactivity and a lot of control. From there, building a dashboard—drilling, production monitoring, exploration, etc.—with live data takes minutes.

All the mentioned processes are automated and require minimal human management. With all the work mentioned above, we enable a user to search for the data of interest, add it to desired visualization widgets (multiple are available for each type of data), and display on their screen with a set of interactive tools to manipulate the visuals. All within minutes, and while being in their home office. 

That’s not all—a user can save the visualizations and data states into a dashboard and share it with their colleagues sitting on a different continent, who can then open the exact same view in a matter of minutes. With more teams working remotely, this seamless collaboration helps facilitate collaboration and reduce data redundancy and errors. 

dash

Data Security

How do we keep this data secure? There are two layers of authentication and authorization implemented in such a system. First, AWS S3 has identity-based access guarantees that data can be visible to only authorized requests. IVAAP uses OAuth2 integrated with AWS Cognito to authenticate the user and authorize the requests. The user logs into the application and gets a couple of tokens that allow them to communicate with IVAAP services. The client passes tokens back to the IVAAP server. In the back end, IVAAP validates the same tokens with AWS Cognito whenever data reads need to happen. When validated, a new, temporary signed access token is issued by S3, which IVAAP uses to make the read from the file in a bucket.

Takeaways

Moving to the cloud isn’t a very simple task and poses a lot of challenges. By using technology provided by AWS and INT’s IVAAP and underlined by OSDU data standardization, we can create a low-latency data QC and visualization system which puts all the data into one place, provides tools to search for data of interest, enables real-time on-demand access to the data from any location with the Internet, and does all that in a secure manner.

For more information on IVAAP, please visit int.com/ivaap/ or to learn more about how INT works with AWS to facilitate subsurface data visualization, check out our webinar, “A New Era in O&G: Critical Components of Bringing Subsurface Data to the Cloud.”


Filed Under: IVAAP Tagged With: AWS, cloud, data visualization, digital transformation, ivaap, subsurface data visualization

May 07 2020

Interactive Network Technologies, Inc. (INT) Integrates Bluware Corp. Volume Data Store (VDS) into IVAAP

INT and Bluware are partnering to empower their upstream clients with true lossless, serverless storage and advanced data visualization in the cloud.

HOUSTON, TX – May 4, 2020 – Interactive Network Technologies, Inc. (INT) a leader in advanced domain visualization in digital exploration and production (E&P) and Bluware Corp., the digital platform that enables the oil and gas industry to accelerate digital transformation initiatives and adopt cloud computing for subsurface data, are pleased to announce the integration of Volume Data Store (VDS), a data format with adaptive streaming technology for seismic data storage, into IVAAP, an upstream data visualization platform. 

IVAAP is an HTML5 data visualization and collaborative platform for large Geoscience and petrophysical data sets in the cloud that empowers product owners, developers, and architects to accelerate the delivery of subsurface digital solutions for oil and gas. Deployable in any cloud environment (Azure®, GCP®, AWS®), IVAAP can scale to meet the needs of tens to thousands of users.


“Companies are pushed to the extreme in terms of remote collaboration and access, and, especially in the case of seismic visualization, finding the right tool to handle large datasets in the cloud can be even more challenging,” says Dr. Olivier Lhemann, President and Founder of INT. “Partnering with Bluware means INT can offer our clients true serverless, lossless storage to visualize their upstream data in the cloud.”


Bluware VDS manages all types of seismic data, including pre-stack, post-stack, WAZ, and more as demanded by an organization’s business needs, workflows, and infrastructure requirements. It can also transfer legacy formats such as SEG-Y or SEP using advanced on-the-fly transcoding on-premise or in the cloud.


“Bluware VDS cloud-native seismic data environment will provide customers with quick, cost-effective, remote access to their data, which is becoming imperative for organizations,” says Dan Piette, CEO at Bluware.


Read the press release on PRWeb >

About Bluware Corp.

Bluware enables oil and gas companies to solve the most challenging objectives in the petrotechnical world. E&P companies use Bluware to achieve previously unthinkable workflows using cloud computing, and artificial intelligence for subsurface data applications and workflows. For more information, visit www.bluware.com.

Filed Under: IVAAP Tagged With: AWS, Azure, Bluware, digital transformation, gcp, ivaap, seismic

Jan 31 2020

What Is Kubernetes?: An Introduction and Overview of the Popular Platform

Over the last several years, Kubernetes has been a developing trend in the tech world, gaining popularity as more and more companies begin to take advantage of cloud-based services. As a non-developer living in a developer world, I wanted to understand more about why we develop our software to work with Kubernetes. So I sat down with INT’s Senior Product Manager Steven Reynolds and Senior Architect James Velasco to learn more about Kubernetes and the advantages of working with it.

Christin: So, Steven, tell me — what in the world is Kubernetes??

Steven: Kubernetes is described as an orchestration platform. It’s usually associated with getting big software up and running. For example, with some of our clients, we have our build set up so that all of the software assets are pushed out and deployed using Kubernetes which takes care of monitoring (pods). If a pod fails, Kubernetes will restart it, and it has nice hooks that can spin up new pods if there’s too much work for one pod to handle.

Christin: What are the advantages of using Kubernetes?

James: Traditionally, you have a service provided by a server. If you migrated, changed, or updated the service, there would be a lot of work to change or configure, set up the new server providing it, and with cloud and cloud providers like AWS, they are moving to automating things. So instead of manually going in and doing all of it, you have tools to automate updating an old version, and switching over to the new one automatically.

Christin: The term microservices is used with Kubernetes — can you go into what microservices does?

James: Microservices is an architectural trend happening right now. Instead of having one big server running everything for a web service, you may have that same web service decomposed into little servers that do separate, well defined parts.

Steven: So the idea of Kubernetes and microservice are different concepts, but they’re talked about together. When using a microservice architecture, it’s an advantage, but it’s also a headache to keep track of all the components.

Christin: So when is it best to use Kubernetes?

Steven: We have 15 to 20 services, and it’s a headache to manage, but you can use Kubernetes to help organize it and help it be more manageable for human beings. There are trade-offs because it makes it better to manage, but there are many tradeoffs as in anything else. It’s the engineer’s dilemma.

James: It tends to only be an advantage if you’re managing a lot of services. So if you’re just managing one or two, then it’s iffy. But if you’re managing 10+ or even just 4 or 5 and those 4 or 5 are made up of 10 or 15 subparts, that is when it makes sense. If I divided all my services like that I may have 10 or 20 and then you may have other vendors or services and you can literally have 100 to 200 of these things. You have to swap out in a unique order and all need to come up and down and all need to be monitored, so that’s what Kubernetes helps you do. Kubernetes is also great to scale up or down.

Christin: That’s really cool. So, Steven mentioned that we have built projects to run on Kubernetes. Does that mean IVAAP can be supported on Kubernetes if requested?

James: Kubernetes is one of the environments that IVAAP targets, if a client requests it. It’s important that we do support it because it is one of the modern deployment styles. And it is common that clients use IVAAP running on Kubernetes. Some clients use Azure or AWS so we have to make sure we can run in all different environments.

******

So there you have it. As a growing trend in software development, Kubernetes can be a better way for companies to deploy and maintain software quickly, especially in a cloud environment. For INT, supporting Kubernetes is an important aspect of how we help meet the needs of our many diverse clients. For more information on IVAAP, check out int.com/ivaap or schedule a demo with one of our team.


Filed Under: IVAAP Tagged With: AWS, Azure, cloud, ivaap, microservices

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