Yandex buys 25% stake in seismic data processing company

PanARMENIAN.Net - Expanding into yet another new market, Russian search giant Yandex announced that it has acquired a 25% stake in seismic data processing company Seismotech for $1 million and will provide the resources to expand the company’s work in geophysical exploration, The Next Web reported.

Following its investment, Yandex will supply the “computing resources and proprietary technologies” to Seismotech, helping the company process and identify data extracted from hydrocarbon deposits, which include oil and gas.

Yandex’s distributed computing technologies will enable the company to process such data on thousands of servers, increasing its computing capacity and crunching tasks quicker than ever before.

As Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh puts it: “Parallel computing technologies we have been using in internet search can now power seismic exploration.”

Seismotech will now have more than 4,000 processor cores at its disposal and in the process will become one of Russia’s largest seismic data processing centers.

The parallels between Yandex and Google are clear to see (they both offer their own powerful search engines, maps, mobile software, email, cloud storage platforms, and other associated services) and are looking to explore other industries and offer their resources to better interpret the data extracted from natural energy deposits.

Seismotech was founded in 2010 and is staffed by personnel who have more than 15 years of experience in scientific research. Yandex will be providing the processing muscle behind the research, but what it identifies may of be more interest to it in the future.