Earth Sciences

Terradue

Innovating services in Earth Science tailored for data-intensive applications

Challenge

The Challenge

Manage large amounts of data

Earth Observations from satellites produce vast amounts of data. In particular, the new Copernicus Sentinel missions are playing an increasingly important role as a reliable high-quality and free open data source for scientific, public sector and commercial activities.

ICT solutions can facilitate the handling of these large volumes of data and are nowadays modifying the expectations that organisations have on new service development and on support to Earth Observation (EO) data exploitation. Their goal is more and more to develop capacities to create added value, involving SLAs and accountability with business partners for the data products and services they bring in this process.

One important challenge for Terradue is to evolve and operate the Geohazards and Hydrology Thematic Exploitation Platforms, which are ESA-funded initiatives.

The solution

The Geohazards Exploitation Platform (GEP) offers a rich set of ready to use EO data processing services for the analysis and monitoring of earthquakes, volcanoes and landslides. The platform federates the geohazards community by creating a workplace with cloud-based models of collaboration, where data providers, users and technology providers join forces to produce scientific and commercial exploitable results.

The GEP, which began in September 2016 covering 20% of the world seismic mask, reached its peak of 50% by the 2nd quarter of 2017 with a production rate of about 320 Sentinel-1 scenes (160 interferometric pairs) per day. This production is fully run on EGI Federated Cloud resources.

To extend the hybrid cloud infrastructure, and provided a reliable Cloud infrastructure for the ESA Thematic Exploitation Platforms users, Terradue used the following services:

The EGI computing and storage resources such as the EGI Cloud Compute and the EGI Online Storage to support the Geohazards Thematic Exploitation Platform (GEP) in the EGI infrastructure.
The EGI Check-in service to secure access of users to the EGI distributed infrastructure.

Check the GEP on the EOSC Marketplace.

Impact

2,400 visitors

to GEP over the last years

991,866 (Cloud) CPU hours

over the last 5 years (2016 – 2021)

3TB RAM

over the last 5 years (2016 – 2021)

Hervé Caumont, Program Manager at Terradue says:

“The collaboration with EGI contributes to the vision of providing European scientists and international institutions with sustainable distributed computing services to support their work and develop Open Science practices. EGI provides sustainable cloud resources and Terradue is an expert company for exploiting cloud computing to process EO data. In the context of this collaboration, EGI and Terradue can provide cost-effective and sustainable solutions for users”. (24.11.2021)