Marine geoscience leader processes its seabed data in Iceland to save on costs and support ESG goals

Shearwater GeoServices moved to atNorth’s ICE02 environmentally cooled and renewable-powered 3000-rack data center, which has produced dramatic results for its bottom line and its ESG metrics.

Faced with sudden price rises and a potential insecurity of supply, Shearwater GeoServices - a global marine geoscience and technology business - has decided to solve both its immediate and long-term data center energy needs by shifting to renewables.

Specifically, the company has moved all its compute-intensive image processing work from its UK data center to an alternative site in Iceland, operated by a specialist Nordic data center supplier called atNorth.

As a result of the migration, the company’s Head of Processing for the Eastern Hemisphere, Nick Riddalls, says that the company has seen a 92% reduction in its CO2 output and an 85 per cent reduction in the cost of hosting the infrastructure needed to perform the large-scale data transformation its business requires. 

He says:

We have seen over 90 per cent reduction in our price of electricity compared to the UK: literally, it's less than 10 per cent of the cost per kilowatt hour. When we started looking at this, it was more about the cost and security supply - but the ESG side of things over the last five years has become increasingly important.

Now, most of our compute is in Iceland.  I'm happy that on our side of the business we’ve done what we can to reduce both our overall carbon footprint and greenhouse gas emissions.

A year and a half long data cooking cycle

Riddalls works for a Norwegian-headquartered provider of geophysical marine seismic acquisition and processing services.

The company harvests data via a fleet of marine vessels equipped with underwater sensors, collecting information about the rock, fluid, and geomechanical properties of the subsurface, such as porosity and fluid saturation of the seabed and the rock beneath it.

It does this by a set of nodes that sit on the ocean floor and sensors towed from surface vessels with proprietary imaging technology and processing software.

Riddalls helps lead the work that then digests and processes all that data to create a set of 2, 3, and 4D images.

These then show both the current characteristics of deposits and changes in reservoir behaviour over time; Shearwater then sells this information to oil and gas companies interested in untapped hydrocarbon reservoirs and to help plan potential drilling operations.

He says:

We have lots of vessels that do surveys, we acquire data, and all that data needs handling, it all needs processing. My department does the imaging, it images what's going on in the rocks, and it processes the data that the vessels acquire. We end up with images of the rocks that we send off to the oil companies or whoever's contracted us, and they interpret it, and decide what to do with that information.

Riddalls adds that more and more of his firm’s customers are also starting to seriously think about CCS (carbon capture and storage), which he sees as a big industry coming up over the next 10 years in his market.

Another burgeoning area for Shearwater’s analysis, he says, is helping plan for potential new offshore wind power sites. But creating that set of images takes a lot of IT:

We’re talking tens, if not hundreds, of terabytes a day of data volume. All that data needs processing, as we run it through 50 algorithms, and it takes about a year, a year and a half, to process.

Avoiding external pressure to turn off the IT tap

As stated, up until 2022 all that processing occurred at the company’s UK HPC (High Performance Computing) facility in the United Kingdom.

However, the onset of Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine created some significant pressures on the UK’s electricity market in both terms of cost and possible ongoing disruption.

Riddalls decided he needed to react to save the company money, but also to protect this key asset - Shearwater’s ability to ‘cook’ all that data.

He says:

I was getting concerned about people talking about brownouts, and data centers use a lot of power: was the government going to say to data center operators like us, you need to turn off some of your power at certain points?

With those thoughts in mind about energy security, but also pricing, we started looking around for non-UK-based data centers.

This was accompanied, he says, by a desire to also start addressing steadily building concerns that he and his team were having around their IT carbon footprint:

I’d started reading about the ESG [environmental, social and governance] side of things, and about how some countries have a much higher level of zero carbon generated electricity than others.

Iceland is pretty much 100 per cent zero-carbon power. When you combine that with the price of electricity there and the way the country is isolated from the general network in Europe, it was great for security of supply, great for the price of electricity and great for carbon. It was a massive win, win, win for all we'd been talking about.

Now, says Riddalls, all that work is being done at a much lower cost in terms of power and cooling at his new data center partner’s ICE02 facility in Iceland.

Located close to Keflavik International Airport in Iceland, ICE02 is a tier 3 data center that claims to enjoy enough free natural cooling and renewable, carbon-free geothermic energy, to offer “highly competitive and stable” prices.

It also claims to offer customers PUE (power usage effectiveness), the main metric used to determine the overall energy efficiency of a data center, of less than or equal to 1.2.

Given that the ideal PUE is 1 - as in, 100 per cent of the building's power is used by the IT equipment it’s housing (compared to 2, which would signal that the data center is using as much power on its maintenance and cooling as the servers) - a PUE of 1.2 would definitely be in line with Iceland’s overall already highly competitive PUE average. The average data center industry PUE ratio in 2023 was 1.58.

A ‘win-win’ for budget and the environment

Despite its host island being 847 miles from the organization’s previous data center location, ICE02 also claims to be competitive in terms of latency, at 15 milliseconds for a single trip to London from Keflavik.

Riddalls says he appreciates that speed - but cautions that ultra-low latency, often cited as the need to locate an organization’s data center very close to where transactions are processed, as on a trading floor, is only really a pressing concern for a minority of industries, so shouldn’t be a barrier to looking at places like Iceland for greener, but also lower-cost, computing centers.

Therefore, he says, more organizations should be proactively looking to both save OpEx and the planet by considering a similar move to Shearwater’s.

He concludes:

Everyone's got data nowadays, so think about how you want to plan to power working with that in the future. It takes a long time to move a data center, and we've gone through that pain over the last year when we moved the last of our equipment here.

Yes, it's been incredibly painful, there's been an incredible amount of disruption. But if you plan for that by stepping back and thinking about your long-term plans for your compute, and looking after your data and how you want to run that, I think this is a really good solution.

At the end of the day, this is saving us a shed load of money and it’s also saving the planet a shed load of CO2. What's not to like?