IEEE Communications Society -- Vancouver Chapter

Meet the speaker and network with your IEEE ComSoc colleagues!

For those who pre-register for this event, we will have pizza and soft
drinks available in Town Square D from 7:00-7:30 pm.

The NEPTUNE Canada Project

Benoît Pirenne, Assistant Director, IT
NEPTUNE Canada

Mon, 9 Jan 2006 7:30 - 9:00 pm
BCIT, Bldg SE2, Town Square D

Preregistration is recommended for this event! Please contact Prof. Dave Michelson, davem@ece.ubc.ca

NEPTUNE will be the world’s largest cable-linked seafloor observatory. It will expand the boundaries of ocean exploration and give us a new way of studying and understanding our planet. NEPTUNE Stage 1 is the first part of this joint U.S.-Canada venture led by the University of Victoria and, in the US, by the National Science Foundation.

The VENUS and NEPTUNE projects are presently funded by CFI /BCKDF to install powered, electro-optic cables and several observatory nodes in coastal and deep-sea environments in the North-East Pacific Ocean. They are pioneering new network technologies using the introduction of power and the Internet to quantitatively monitor and interpret all aspects of the marine environment in real time, which will transform the ocean sciences and train a new generation of scientists in these fields.

Fixed and mobile observing systems/sensors/vehicles will be deployed in and on the sea floor and buoyed through the water column. These will transmit huge data flows via shore stations to a Data Centre at the University of Victoria (UVic) and then to researchers and outreach agencies around the world. Community experiments will involve issues relating to plate tectonics/earthquakes/tsunamis, black smokers, microbial life and gas hydrates, temporal/spatial changes in the water column and impact on biological communities and fisheries. Data acquisition will take place on a continuous basis (24/7) over about 25 years.

The rate of data collection will vary from instrument to instrument and on scale and rates of natural events. One of the lead scientific goals of both projects is establish long time series of complex interacting phenomena to more fully understand the Earth System processes. This places particular demands and challenges for the Data Management and Archiving System (DMAS).

Benoît Pirenne, Assistant Director, IT, for NEPTUNE Canada and in charge of the DMAS development, obtained a Master in Computer Science from the University of Namur, Belgium in 1986. Immediately following the degree, he worked for the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching, Germany. In 2000, he was heading ESO's Operations Technical Support department. With a staff of 16, he was assuming the responsibility for a 30TB science archive and allowing over 3000 users to access ESO and Hubble astronomical data. During these years, he was a key participant in the development of ESO's end-to-end data system, recently awarded ComputerWorld's 21st Century Achievement Award recognizing world-class IT excellence. Benoît joined the NEPTUNE project in October 2004.