Wilber 3: A Python-Django Web Application For Acquiring Large-scale Event-oriented Seismic Data
Newman, R.L., Clark, A., Trabant, C.M., Karstens, R., Hutko, A.R., Casey, R.E., Ahern, T.K.
(December 2013)
Abstract
Since 2001, the IRIS Data Management Center (DMC) WILBER II system has provided a convenient web-based interface for locating seismic data related to a particular event, and requesting a subset of that data for download. Since its launch, both the scale of available data and the technology of web-based applications have developed significantly. Wilber 3 is a ground-up redesign that leverages a number of public and open-source projects to provide an event-oriented data request interface with a high level of interactivity and scalability for multiple data types.
Wilber 3 uses the IRIS/Federation of Digital Seismic Networks (FDSN) web services for event data, metadata, and time-series data. Combining a carefully optimized Google Map with the highly scalable SlickGrid data API, the Wilber 3 client-side interface can load tens of thousands of events or networks/stations in a single request, and provide instantly responsive browsing, sorting, and filtering of event and meta data in the web browser, without further reliance on the data service.
The server-side of Wilber 3 is a Python-Django application, one of over a dozen developed in the last year at IRIS, whose common framework, components, and administrative overhead represent a massive savings in developer resources. Requests for assembled datasets, which may include thousands of data channels and gigabytes of data, are queued and executed using the Celery distributed Python task scheduler, giving Wilber 3 the ability to operate in parallel across a large number of nodes.
