Yandex Supports Geophysical Exploration

Internet, June 22, 2012. Yandex (NASDAQ: YNDX) announced today that it has expanded into another new application area for its computing technologies, providing support for geophysical exploration. Yandex, one of the world's largest web search providers, has supplied computing resources and proprietary technologies to the geophysical seismic data processing company Seismotech, following the acquisition by Yandex of a stake in Seismotech.

Seismic methods are used in exploration geophysics mostly to find hydrocarbon deposits, such as those of oil and gas. These techniques require the processing of large volumes of data. Using Yandex’s distributed computing technology enables Seismotech to process its data simultaneously on hundreds and even thousands of servers. This allows the geophysical data processing company to increase its computing capacities and solve tasks much faster.

“The IT industry has been the major consumer of computing power in recent years. It’s no wonder that the latest, most efficient data processing technologies have been developed exactly in this sphere. At the same time, there are other computing-intensive domains – geophysics being a classical example. Parallel computing technologies we have been using in internet search can now power seismic exploration,” says Arkady Volozh, CEO of Yandex.

“Computing resources and technologies provided to us by Yandex will considerably increase our processing capacities and will give us an opportunity to take our services to another level. What used to take us a few months to calculate will now be done in a matter of hours. This is something that puts us in an excellent position for developing new services for geophysical exploration and offering them to our clients,” says Dmitry Mosyakov, СEO of Seismotech.

In addition to benefitting from Yandex's technologies, Seismotech also uses a total of almost 4,000 processor cores inside high performance servers located at Yandex's own data centers. Powered by Yandex, Seismotech now becomes one of Russia's largest seismic data processing centers. Yandex has purchased 25% of the company for one million US dollars.

Seismotech develops algorithmic solutions and program software for geophysical data processing, as well offering seismic data processing and interpreting services. The company's leading product, next generation geology-driven seismic processing software Prime, has been widely acknowledged by experts. Siesmotech's clients include Statoil, ONGC, Russian State Research Institute for Geological, Geophysical and Geochemical Systems, DiallAliance, LukBelOil.

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