An Open-source Object Storage for Distributed Acoustic Sensing
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Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) is the recording of strain measurements distributed along an optic fiber cable using photonic sensing. DAS can record signals from cars, trains, ships, planes, earthquakes, volcanic tremors, avalanches, footsteps, and whales. The technology is a revolution for seismology research, with great potential for frontier applications such as wildlife monitoring and the built environment. The data comes in at a high rate (100-10kHz) and multi-channels (100s-10,000s) continuously. The Photonic Sensing Facility (PSF) at UW already has 100sTBs of DAS data from 3 PSF-related experiments. At the same time, the PSF is planning several short- and long-term experiments that will bring the data archive to 1PB by the end of 2023. This large amount of data necessitates the exploration of the data format and metadata structure for fast data queries and processing. This incubator project aims to pilot the first cloud object storage to host DAS data. Our team will deploy a local cloud storage service on our local servers to emulate a cloud platform for DAS research using cloud-optimized data formats. The outcome of the project will be a pilot experiment promoted for authoritative seismic networks and archives.